3
“The Ablest and Most Valuable Fly Rapidly Westward”

Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860–1900

As railroads grafted the West to the nation with iron stitches and sanitariums and luxury hotels for invalids boasted of the region’s healthfulness, some critics argued that too much sun and invigorating air, though good for invalids, might prove detrimental to the continued domination of the Anglo-Saxon race. This fear had long simmered in the debate between those who favored monogenesis versus proponents of polygenesis, but now the new racial science of Social Darwinism and eugenics reignited the debate. The region could never become the white man’s West until these questions of racial degeneration had been laid to rest.

In the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana warned against the “disease” of laziness that appeared endemic in California society. His prediction of possible racial decay echoed throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Bayard Taylor, a popular travel writer in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, summed up the paradox of racial development and climate, writing: “In regard to climate, we are met by this difficulty, that that which is most enjoyable is not best adapted to the development of the human race.” This phenomena existed because “the zone of action and achievement lies between lat[itudes] 35th and 55th North. On either side of this belt we have a superabundance of the benumbing [cold] or relaxing [hot] element.”¹ In extremely cold climates people struggled to survive, and the harsh weather precluded the development of real civilization; thus groups like the Inuit and the Laplanders never advanced beyond the primitive stages of human development, or so Taylor claimed. In warmer climates nature was too easy on humanity. With nature providing food and a warm and pleasant environment, work did not motivate humankind, and peoples in these warm climates likewise did not advance beyond primitive stages of development. Taylor predicted that an end to the ancient struggle with a harsh and unrelenting nature would lead whites into the inferiority characteristic of the native Hispanics and Indians of the West.

White racial vigor, the hallmark of progress, emanated from climates that were neither too hot nor too cold. Northern Europeans, born struggling against an inhospitable climate, had evolved as superior beings to the darker peoples of the world because they had learned to survive through struggle. As the fittest, strongest peoples on the planet, they told themselves, it seemed self-evident that they had emerged as the dominant power on the globe. Colonialism closely tied notions of race to imperial conquest, but in the American West, as Taylor suggested, contact with the region’s beneficent climate might lead to racial degeneration. Underneath the bravado of Manifest Destiny lingered the fear that Anglo-Americans would soon sink to the level of their non-Anglo neighbors.²

It would fall to westerners themselves to argue against the belief in climate-induced racial degeneration, and they, too, would draw on an environmental explanation to justify the superiority of their culture and society. Charles Fletcher Lummis, Joseph Pomeroy Widney, and others argued that under sunny western skies, Anglo-Americans would advance to an unprecedented state in world history. These western boosters, challenging the assumption that they inhabited a frontier society, argued that the West had grown into the most civilized, moral, progressive, advanced, and whitest region of the nation. Freed from the hardships of a repressive eastern or European winter, Anglo-Saxons in the temperate West would achieve a level of comfort and development unprecedented in the history of the world. Far from a place of racial decline, they argued, the West would become a new, ideal homeland for the fittest people on the planet, and along the shores of the Pacific would emerge a new empire greater than any that had come before in human history.

Bayard Taylor, in 1861, addressed the issue of climate and racial degeneration. He found native Californians “vastly superior to the Mexicans,” with “larger frames, stronger muscle, and a fresh, ruddy complexion.”³ Significantly, these people now enjoyed citizenship in the United States. Native Mexicans presented a very different story. Mexico, he explained, while exceedingly fertile and pleasant, did not foster racial vigor. In Mexico, he wrote, “under the influence of a perpetual summer, the native race becomes indolent and careless of the future. Nature does everything for them.” Beans emerged from the ground in limitless profusion, and fruits literally fell from the trees into their hands. While appearing “lithe and agile” and utterly free (or at least Taylor thought so), theirs was a pointless existence, which allowed them to “never step out of the blind though contented round which their fathers walked before them.”⁴ As a result, their intellect and racial vigor atrophied.

Helen Hunt Jackson, touring California more than forty years after Richard Henry Dana and a decade after Taylor, echoed their opinions. Jackson observed, “Climate is to a country what temperament is to a man—Fate.” In the tropics, she explained, “human activities languish; intellect is supine; only the passions, human nature’s rank weed-growths, thrive.” Colder climates lacked the fecundity of the tropics and held no prospects of appeal for Americans. There existed a few places, however, “Florida, Italy, the South of France and of Spain, a few islands, and South California,” warm enough to inspire animal and plant productivity without leading to the languishing of intellect.⁵ Jackson became infatuated with Southern California, and her California novel, Ramona, became a national bestseller and the inspiration for a revival of the region’s Hispanic and Indian cultures, albeit in a heavily romantic way.⁶ Yet even she had doubts about California’s suitability for Anglo-Americans. She wrote, “One never escapes from an undercurrent of wonder that there should be any industries or industry [in Southern California]. No winter to be prepared for; no fixed time at which anything must be done or not done at all; the air sunny, balmy, dreamy, seductive, making the mere being alive in it a pleasure; all sorts of fruits and grains growing a-riot, and taking care of themselves.” In such an environment “it is easy to understand the character, or, to speak more accurately, the lack of character, of the old Mexican and Spanish Californians.”⁷ Their life of ease and contentment had been replaced by a more productive and ambitious race. She imagined California’s Spanish founders “shuddering, even in heaven, as they look down to-day on his [the Yankee’s] colonies, his railroads, his crops—their whole land humming and buzzing with his industries.”⁸

Yet had the conquerors themselves been conquered? Americans may have taken California, but in the end California might triumph. The laziness of Californios, Hispanic Californians, Jackson warned, could return:

Jackson could see racial degeneration resulting from California’s pleasant climate, but a sense of ambivalence whispered in her work, a belief that something could be said for a life not measured by money and hectic activity. This reevaluation of priorities would be a theme in the work of later defenders of California and the West such as Charles Fletcher Lummis.

Evidence of this climatic degeneration, as Jackson intimated, supposedly existed among the native peoples of the Southwest. Americans criticized Hispanics and Indians for being lazy because nature did too much for them. Josiah Gregg’s influential travelogue, Commerce of the Prairies (first published in 1844), like Dana’s work, helped foment attitudes toward Hispanics. New Mexicans, he asserted, were indolent, immoral, fanatical in their religious beliefs, lacking in intelligence “except in artifice [and exhibiting] no profundity except for intrigue.”¹⁰ John Hanson Beadle, writing in the 1870s, agreed with Gregg. “Take [New Mexicans] all in all,” Beadle claimed, “they are a strangely polite, lazy, hospitable, lascivious, kind, careless and no account race.”¹¹ A Rocky Mountain News contributor in Santa Fe concurred: “The Mexican people . . . are a mixture of the Spanish and the old native, or Indian, races and seem to have inherited the vices and bad qualities of each,” including ignorance, superstition, laziness, and lack of ambition. Americans, conversely, “with their thrift, intelligence, and progress [are] making a new era for New Mexico.”¹² Anglo-Americans offered remoteness, the domination of the lower classes by the Catholic Church and the wealthy, a lack of democracy and education, and miscegenation as additional explanations for Hispanic inferiority, but climate also played a key role.¹³

Climatic degeneration made men cowardly, weak, and effeminate, while women became lascivious, as Dana had asserted when discussing the Bandinis of California, an influential couple he had met during his visit in the 1830s. Many later observers agreed with both assessments. Frederick Law Olmsted admired the Hispanic women he met in Texas and Mexico. He attributed their beauty, at least in part, to the climate. “Their dresses,” he wrote with barely restrained glee, “seemed lazily reluctant to cover their plump persons, and their attitudes were always expressive of the influences of a Southern sun upon national manners.”¹⁴ Being plump signified healthfulness, which Texas provided, and the sun made these women eager to expose more of themselves than American women would have dared. Sexual forwardness resulted from this solar seduction.

Hispanic women did not enchant every American man, or at least they did not admit to it in print. Beadle demurred from the perspective of Dana and Olmsted. He wrote, “Barbarous people are never really beautiful; and where women are freest, there most beauty is found.” Free from the control of superstitions and a false religion, American women remained the most beautiful. With patriotic zeal he even appropriated Patrick Henry’s famous quote, declaring, “Give me an American woman or give me death!”¹⁵ A superior culture, Beadle asserted, could only develop from a superior civilization; a debased civilization would inevitably succumb to the environment, and no red-blooded American man should surrender to the temptations of a seductive climate or the flirtatious women who inhabited it.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Fletcher Lummis, a Hispanophile in every sense of the word, came to a much different conclusion. He had long been captivated by the women of the Spanish Southwest (a fact that drew considerable comment from his detractors and apparently with good reason, as his wife accused him of infidelity with several women, including at least one Hispanic woman, during divorce proceedings in 1909). He set out to defend their beauty and morality in the January 1895 issue of Land of Sunshine, the magazine he edited in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Lummis described all the women of Spanish America as fair, but the fairest could be found on the northern and southern extremes, far from the heat and “African” influences.¹⁶ California’s Hispanic women, not surprisingly, ranked as his favorites. He wrote, “As a rule, the facial types of the cooler Spanish-American countries are . . . finer, more spiritual, than those nearer the equator.”¹⁷ The accompanying illustrations showed that when he wrote “finer” and “more spiritual,” he meant whiter. His rhetoric assumed implicitly that being far away from the heat of the tropics, where Africans thrived, made the women lighter skinned and therefore more Spanish and attractive.

Clearly, therefore, the idea that genial climates could lead to racial degeneration remained in circulation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lummis and other western defenders, however, had a new scientific tool at their disposal, a tool that would enable them to address their critics and lay to rest fears of climatic degeneration: evolutionary theory and its bastardized progeny, Social Darwinism and eugenics. These new ideas indelibly shaped the argument over the appropriateness of Anglo settlement in the American West.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, published in 1859, marked a dramatic breakthrough in the natural sciences, accounting for the tremendous variation in the world’s flora and fauna by postulating that plants and animals gradually adapted to changes in the environment over many millennia. This slow rate of change, over the course of centuries, made the fears of rapid racial degeneration suddenly seem laughable.

Figure 3.1.Charles Fletcher Lummis loved the Del Valle family, spending a great deal of time with them. No doubt when he celebrated the beauty of Hispanic women, he had the Del Valle girls in mind. Courtesy, Braun Research Library Collection, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA.

Evolutionary theory quickly spread beyond a small group of scientists to historians, ethnologists, the newly emerging sociologists, and scores of other thinkers, all applying evolutionary principles to their disciplines and society at large. America in the late nineteenth century latched on to the theory with tremendous enthusiasm for, in the hands of Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, it made sense of a rapidly changing and industrializing nation and justified the continued domination of Anglo-Americans over supposedly inferior and less well-adapted immigrants. According to historian Richard Hofstadter, Americans took to Darwin’s theory and its supposed social implications so rapidly that post-bellum America could be called “the Darwinian country. England gave Darwin to the world, but the United States gave to Darwinism an unusually quick and sympathetic reception.”¹⁸ The theory, moreover, argued against radical social changes and reforms like socialism, communism, and even more modest reforms, because would not social change, like biological change, be slow, spanning generations? Furthermore, in a system based on competition, the wisest men would naturally be the most powerful and affluent, and the inferior laboring classes would be below them. Both of these observations spoke to a conservative impulse among America’s Anglo elite.

Herbert Spencer became the most influential thinker to articulate and popularize the social implications of Darwin’s theory. Adapting Darwin’s ideas, Spencer wrote several volumes of his Synthetic Philosophy in the 1860s and 1870s. These essentially summarized the latest scientific findings, not just those relating to Darwinism but also to geology, embryology, physics, and even philosophical meditations like those of Thomas Malthus. Spencer’s genius lay in making these varied ideas accessible and applicable to modern society, but Darwin’s theory was clearly the focal point of Spencer’s system of human society. Coining the term the survival of the fittest (seven years before Darwin published Origin), he argued that each generation represented the triumph of the best humans over the less-adapted ones. The poor were the least fit to survive, and for the betterment of humanity as a whole the state should not aid the poor in any way. It might seem cruel, he argued, but if the poor “are not sufficiently complete to live,” he wrote, “they die, and it is best they should die.”¹⁹

Social Darwinism should not be blamed for causing American imperialism, but it certainly helped justify it. Americans, after all, had long harbored a sense of mission that had a racial dimension. Just as the supposedly scientifically factual racial Anglo-Saxonism of polygenesis justified the Mexican-American War, Darwin’s theory gave late-nineteenth-century racism and imperial expansion a basis in cutting-edge science. Social Darwinism explained war as beneficial. In the hands of imperialistic thinkers, war became not something to be avoided but instead a competition pitting man against man, with the strongest emerging victorious. It fell upon Americans as heirs to the legacy of the Anglo-Saxons to continue the westward expansion of the race.²⁰ In the 1880s John Fiske, an acolyte of the pacifistic Spencer, gave a series of lectures celebrating the Anglo-Saxon legacy of Americans and their English cousins. He argued that the democratic legacy of ancient Rome had been carried forward by the hardy Anglo-Saxon and Germanic tribes after the fall of the Roman empire. Anglo-Saxons had a duty to continue the expansion of freedom and democracy. The next step in world history, he argued, was the global domination of Anglo-Saxons, which would, perhaps somewhat ironically given their supposed martial prowess, usher in an era of worldwide peace. Americans and Englishmen would soon outbreed other, lesser races, transforming the Americas and perhaps even Africa into new Anglo-Saxon strongholds. Fiske’s lectures so captivated Americans that more than twenty newspapers published his 1885 lecture on Manifest Destiny. He had lectured in England and before a crowd that included President Rutherford B. Hayes, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and numerous other dignitaries.²¹

Aline Gorren, in Anglo-Saxons and Others, also explicitly linked imperialism and industrial acumen to evolutionary theory, arguing that Anglo-Saxons, alone among the white races of the world, seemed suited to industrial development and imperial expansion. Modern society, with its great factories and mechanized armies, differed markedly from any that had preceded it. This was the new environment of the modern age, and, as with any environmental change, only the strongest and fittest would thrive. Gorren claimed, “The Anglo-Saxons are the only peoples who [are in] perfect accord with the characteristic conditions of modern life. They are in absolute harmony with their environment as it is constituted by those conditions. Other peoples . . . are striving to adapt themselves, but they fail in part because their organs are not prepared for the new functions demanded of them.”²²

A pragmatic philosophy and a desire to work hard enough to procure material comfort separated the Anglo-Saxons from all other races, even the other white peoples of Europe. “Evolution,” Gorren noted, “had sanctified the wisdom of their practical view of life. It might be said that one must never again speak slightingly of material instincts, of a like for good food, and good clothes, and a good home . . . provided one have the love of action which makes the hard work necessary for the obtaining of these things not too desperately irksome.” From this self-interest would come a desire to show the rest of the world how best to live or, in short, how best to be like the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon lifestyle of pragmatism and material comfort would appear “like a revelation directly from on high and which lift[s] up the Anglo-Saxon as a beacon light to humanity.”²³ Some would see that beacon and change; others would not. The twentieth century, Gorren warned, would “be one fierce fight for self-preservation, in which it is certainly the weakest that will go to the wall, those, that is, whose equipment is the least complete for the special business at hand.” Evolution had dictated that only those best suited to the industrial world would survive. With a flair for understatement he wrote, “It is safe to assume that the Anglo-Saxons will not be of that number, for it has been observed that they are the most perfect.”²⁴

Evolutionary theory not only justified white supremacy and imperial expansion but also alleviated guilt over conquest. Gorren and others could speak in euphemisms such as “going to the wall,” but in practice that meant extinction of the “lesser” races. For support of the view that inferior races would disappear, one need not look far. Darwin’s theory stressed confrontation and the triumph of the strongest over the weakest. As Hofstadter noted, “Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of [the] Species, which had referred in its subtitle to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.”²⁵ Darwin, indeed, indulged in the stock racism of his age, writing in The Descent of Man, “The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated.” The result would be a greater gap between man and animal as struggle wiped out Africans and Australian Aborigines on the human side and gorillas and other primates on the animal side.²⁶

Extinction discourse, as contemporary scholars have called the belief that “savage” peoples were fated to disappear, issued from racism and imperialism. Often, the phrasing of arguments implied extinction as something natural and therefore unavoidable, not the product of European invasion. Primitive peoples would naturally vanish before the onslaught of European immigration. Warfare and disease—the latter mysterious and often attributed to forces beyond human understanding—contributed to the passing of races. Another cause existed as well: savagery would be self-extinguishing. “Savage” practices like infanticide and human sacrifice would lead these races to commit “race suicide.” The historian Patrick Brantlinger has observed that this notion amounted to “an extreme form of blaming the victim.” The widespread belief in extinction also created a consensus among Europeans, even those working to save the primitive races, that extinction was inevitable, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that nevertheless ameliorated white guilt. Whites themselves had not caused the precipitous decline in native populations; it had simply resulted from natural Darwinian competition or perhaps the will of a dispassionate God.²⁷

Westerners certainly agreed with much of Social Darwinism and the later eugenics movement. Some like Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, even shaped the debate, and there existed distinctive regional variations on these issues in the West. Extinction discourse, for example, assuaged westerners’ guilt over the supposed disappearance of American Indians. With the conquest of the West complete by the last third of the nineteenth century, attention could be shifted to the issue of climate and racial degeneration. Whites had clearly taken up residence in the region, and one day the region would become important and powerful, but the predictions of writers from Richard Henry Dana to Bayard Taylor haunted westerners who worried that their region would produce only an inferior population. To put these ghosts to rest, westerners needed to arrive at a belief that whiteness could thrive in a climate that seemed so alien to anything in the race’s past.

Charles Fletcher Lummis, for one, brandished Darwinism like a club, striking fiercely at the notion that western expansion would lead to racial decay.²⁸ As editor of the influential magazine Land of Sunshine (later renamed Out West), Lummis argued that California’s climate would improve the race and make the state the most powerful in the nation.²⁹ Addressing the issue in his first Land of Sunshine editorial in January 1895, he asserted that the Golden State’s development represented not just another chapter in the story of American settlement but rather the beginning of a new era in the history of humanity: “Here for the very first time the Saxon has made himself fully at home in a perfect type of the semi-tropics.” Historically, “Our blood has befalled [sic] climes where to keep alive was in itself a reasonably active occupation. What will be the human outcome of this radical change[?]” Lummis answered his own rhetorical question, arguing that a new society would emerge superior to both the old, indolent Hispanic one and the vigorous but stodgy society of Lummis’s native New England: “Southern California is not only the new Eden of the Saxon home-seeker, but part, and type, of Spanish-America; the scene where American energy has wrought miracles . . . but under the skies of New Spain.”³⁰

A year later, in one of many editorials Lummis wrote comparing California to the East, he again defended his adopted state’s weather. Referring to himself in the third person he wrote, “He is not a Southwesterner because he has to be, but because he chooses. He counts it the most important venture his Saxon tribe ever made—this trying on of its first comfortable environment. And by so much as he believes in evolution, he believes that in this motherly climate the race now foremost in the world will fairly outstrip itself in achievement; and most of all in what is best of all—the joy of life.”³¹

A large portion of the February 1896 issue addressed the question of racial degeneration and California’s climate. Lummis charged Charles Dudley Warner, an alleged expert on the relationship between race and climate (though in reality an eastern writer and editor most famous for coauthoring The Gilded Age with Mark Twain), with defending Southern California’s climate.³² Warner explained that Anglos did poorly in exceptionally hot climates, such as the Caribbean. Blacks in these climates indeed appeared healthier than whites, he conceded, but the heat and humidity sapped their vigor, leaving them lazy and unmotivated. Civilization needed a cooler environment in which to thrive. He wrote, “It is the lesson of experience that the white races thrive best, produce the best results of civilization, in temperate and even in rough climates. Greece, Italy, Spain, furnish no exceptions to this, for in each [a] very appreciable winter prevails.” A winter’s chill, it seemed, could create civilization, and Anglos excelled in such frigid conditions.³³ Warner was essentially arguing that California was nice but, like Italy and Greece, the wellsprings of Western civilization, not too nice.

He next addressed the question of environment and racial vigor, asking, “Will the settlers hold their northern vigor and enterprise, or will they follow the example of their occupiers, the Spanish Americans?”³⁴ The answer was neither. A healthier climate, Warner argued, would not hurt Anglos, who were strong enough to endure the nicest weather, and they might even benefit from it. Southern California perhaps could become a place “reasonably prosperous, not without energy, industrially and intellectually, and yet not have the restlessness of some others I know, and not be in a continuous exasperating war with nature and with man.”³⁵ Lummis, in his editorial for the same issue, succinctly answered those who argued that California threatened the survival of the race. He quipped, “If that gentleman’s [i.e., Anglo-Saxon’s] . . . stamina is of such poor sort that it will spoil if not kept on ice—then it isn’t quite so essential to the world’s development as he is inclined to deem it.”³⁶

Lummis would spend most of the next thirty years recapitulating his belief in California’s destiny. Every issue of the Land of Sunshine/Out West showcased at least one of Southern California’s rapidly growing towns. On the surface these articles were simply intended to lure home-seekers and investors, detailing such prosaic things as the number of schools and churches, the size and productivity of farms, and so on; but the subtext behind the black-and-white photos and the narrative of promotion maintained that Southern California merged Anglo-Saxon vigor with the climate of the Mediterranean, creating an area of unprecedented wealth and growth. California’s destiny as a great and powerful area seemed assured.

Like Lummis, Joseph Pomeroy Widney, a former army surgeon during the wars against the Apache in Arizona and later a promoter of Southern California, believed in the racial destiny of California and the West. Widney felt the West offered the American Anglo-Saxon (or in his terminology the Engle-American) a chance at world domination. While Lummis and Warner argued that whites had never experienced a climate as nice as those of California and the Southwest, Widney argued that the conquest of the West represented a return to the distant past, a time when Aryan horsemen had claimed not the American West but the plains of Asia. In the second volume of his two-volume epic The Race Life of the Aryan Peoples he wrote, “The cowboy of the Western plains of America is only the cowboy of the uplands of Mid-Asia of three thousand years ago come to life again. His prototype is more than hinted at in the cow songs of the Hymns to the Maruts and in the earlier Avestas, even to the ‘round-ups,’ lacking only the grim crack of the revolver, but not lacking the grim spirit of battling.”³⁷ Unlike Washington Irving, who feared the wild plains, Widney believed losing some of the “settled habits” of European life would not lead to savagery but instead would represent a return to Aryan racial destiny: “As America east of the Mississippi is Europe, only a modified Europe; so America west of the Mississippi is Asia, only a modified Asia.”³⁸ Settling the West was not an attempt at settling in a new climate but rather a homecoming. Best of all, Anglo-Americans could have Mexico as well because its high, dry central plateau was not unlike the Asian high plains or California.³⁹

Widney did, however, agree with most observers about the debilitative effects of tropical climates on the Aryan races, ranking climate as the second-most-important influence on racial degeneration behind only miscegenation. Races would remain true to their ancestry as long as they continued to live in climates conducive to them. Canada’s cold climate had proven unfavorable to the French, and the Spanish, likewise, had succumbed to racial degeneration in the New World. He claimed, “The Spaniard landed south of his normal climatic home . . . to the hot, humid shores of the West Indies . . . the Gulf of Mexico, and . . . the east slope of the Andes.” Spain’s tropical settlements were therefore capable of breeding malaria and yellow fever but not “the iron-sinewed [conquistadors] of the high dry mesas of Castile and Leon . . . who, clad in armor, could toil through the everglades of Florida battling their way on to the banks of the Mississippi, [braving] the marshy plains of tierra caliente with their dread vomito.” Instead, miscegenation and climatic degeneration destroyed the race and banished the conquistador to memory. Widney continued, “The half-breed children of these men of storm and stress swung in the hammock under tropical shades, smoking the cigarette, and dreaming away the noonday hours, while men of a sterner breed despoiled them of their patrimony. The life of storm and stress for them did not exist; and the empire their fathers had won in toil and battling slipped unheeded from nerveless hands.”⁴⁰ The Spanish-American War closed, he argued, the final chapter in the story of Spanish racial degeneration, and their defeat at the hands of the racially vigorous Aryan Americans provided a cautionary tale about the limits of imperialism. Environment determined race, and empires that overreached, expanding into climates unfamiliar to their racial past, were destined to fall; but, excepting the tropics, it was America’s duty to spread its control over the temperate sections of the globe. He concluded, echoing Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, “The end of it all is the survival of the fittest; and this is Imperialism. And it has been the race law of the world from the beginning.”⁴¹

Lummis’s and Widney’s use of Social Darwinism to defend the western climate from its detractors marked only the beginning of their argument. Western intellectuals, keen on using Social Darwinism and eugenics to their advantage, argued that westerners, in fact, collectively constituted the most advanced people on the planet. Anglo-Americans in the late nineteenth century faced the danger of too much civilization. A beneficent climate would not cause racial degeneration, but life in comfortable cities could. Without a frontier to conquer and battles to win, Anglo-Americans would become weak and effeminate. Indeed, perhaps many had already succumbed to inferiority.

Americans might be stronger and more vigorous than Europeans, but they, too, were threatened by comfort and weakness. Colonists to the New World had left behind the insulating civility of Europe to battle with a harsh nature and American Indians. They had been strengthened by the rigors of western expansion and settlement, the weak dying and the strong enduring. Out of this struggle with savages and the wilderness, they had become American. This argument meshed well with Social Darwinism and eugenic theory.

By the early years of the twentieth century, Anglo-Americans seemed increasingly enamored of eugenics, the science of encouraging desirable (middle-class Anglo-American) citizens to breed while discouraging lesser peoples like immigrants and African Americans from doing so. Leading eugenicists like Charles Benedict Davenport and Stanford’s David Starr Jordan found an eager audience in westerners. As the historian Alexandra Minna Stern has argued, eugenics was a national and not just an eastern phenomenon that took hold in the West. She noted that “California performed twenty thousand sterilizations, one-third of the total performed in the country, that Oregon created a state eugenics board in 1917, and that the impact of restrictive immigration laws designed to shield America from polluting ‘germ plasm’ reverberated with great intensity along the Mexican border.” The West, she asserted, also provided a racial mythology that eugenicists appropriated, a mythology based on an updated version of the “noble westward march of Anglo-Saxons and Nordics.”⁴²

Conversely, western proponents declared their region, not the East, the most advanced section of the country. The West, they argued, had become a refuge from the problems of the Gilded Age, a place free of urban slums, machine politics, and “undigestible immigrants.” The non-white groups of the West, the Indians, Hispanics, and Chinese, were harmless and romantic—unlike the millions of immigrants flooding the nation’s eastern ports who threatened to destroy democracy itself through their willingness to vote for political machines.

Drawing on Social Darwinism and eugenics, westerners justified the inevitable settlement of non-Anglo immigrants as well. Those who made it to the West, whether native-born or foreign, represented the best of the best, the bravest, fittest, most energetic examples of humanity. Immigrants to the region would not pose a threat as did those in the East because they were of a better class and much smaller in number. Limits to this belief existed, however. Many westerners were reluctant to admit that the Chinese were equal members of society, and they considered the clannish and odd Mormons inferior to mainstream Americans, despite the fact that their membership was heavily composed of desirable Northern European immigrant groups.

To convince Americans of the superiority of western society, westerners nevertheless had to confront the dominant view of the region as a frontier. The image of the West as a backward, violent frontier with little civilization and culture had become a well-established stereotype by the middle of the nineteenth century, but its origins preceded the founding of the United States.⁴³ No less a critic than the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville saw the frontier as a threat to American democracy. Every year, Americans “quit the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean to plunge into the Western wilderness,” he observed. These were rootless people, often outcasts in their home states, people filled with greedy desires. They entered a world without laws and authority, without family connections and tradition or morality. Still, these inferior peoples could join as equal members of the Union, giving them the right to govern the nation “before they have learned to govern themselves.”⁴⁴ Tocqueville did not simply observe that westerners could not create effective governments on the frontier but also that they could not “govern” or restrain the passions that life on the frontier undoubtedly exposed. The perpetuation of democracy, however, required restraining such base passions. Tocqueville’s criticism of frontiersmen foreshadowed criticism of recent immigrants, who also supposedly lacked the mental acumen necessary for democracy. Nevertheless, other visitors to the frontier echoed Tocqueville’s observations.

Isabella Bird, an English traveler, wrote to her sister in 1873 describing life on the Colorado frontier as “moral, hard, unloving, unlovely, unrelieved, unbeautified, [and] grinding.” Such “discomfort and lack of ease and refinement . . . seems only possible to people of British stock.”⁴⁵ Worse, Coloradans cared little for organized religion, and taking advantage of “your neighbor in every fashion which is not illegal, is the quality held in the greatest repute.”⁴⁶ She assured her sister of her complete safety, despite traveling alone, among such godless heathens, but violence lingered nearby even in her narrative.

Bird herself never encountered the worst aspects of western frontier life, perhaps because of the deference even frontiersmen showed to women, especially genteel women like herself. Yet she met at least one man whose reputation for violence preceded him. He was Mountain Jim, her guide up Longs Peak and a notorious trapper with “ ‘Desperado’ . . . written in large letters all over him.” Mountain Jim was a shocking sight, missing an eye from an encounter with a grizzly bear and dressed in tatters with a large knife and a revolver tucked into his belt. Yet, “as he spoke I forgot both his reputation and appearance, for his manner was that of a chivalrous gentleman, his accent refined, and his language easy and elegant.”⁴⁷ In a footnote Bird explained that nine months after their tour of Estes Park, someone murdered Mountain Jim: “His life, without doubt, was deeply stained with crimes and vices, and his reputation for ruffianism was a deserved one.”⁴⁸ Still, she had found fears of the harshness of frontier life to be overblown.

The writers of a celebratory sketch of Los Angeles (written in 1876 to commemorate both the American centennial and the approximately first century of Los Angeles history) admitted that the Anglo influx into Southern California “was not always made up of the more peaceable elements of society. Men of questionable character, men of no character, drifted in.” Yet these “sun-tanned,” strong, and vigorous men instantly cast off “the long, slumb’rous years of the old Missions and ranchos,” bringing progress and commerce to the region, a fair trade for a period of violence.⁴⁹ Thus even boomers like the trio behind the sketch of Los Angeles could not entirely break with the impression of the West as a rough country, filled with rough people. American popular culture, from James Fenimore Cooper onward, had found in the frontier adventure and violence, and dissuading outsiders of the myth of the romantic and adventurous West would prove nearly impossible.⁵⁰

Not everyone, however, found the frontier and its people uncouth and dangerous. Helen Hunt Jackson, a cultured New England writer, found Colorado to her liking—at least once she got over the shock of the move and the radically different landscape. Forced, like many other invalids, to migrate in search of a curative climate, Helen Hunt (not yet a Jackson) moved to Colorado Springs in 1873. A convert to the West, Jackson spent the last decade of her life celebrating the West and its peoples, including the American Indians, whom she believed the federal government and American civilization had severely mistreated.⁵¹

She adored her new hometown of Colorado Springs, writing numerous essays extolling the beauty of the scenery and the kindness of her neighbors. Western towns might be rough in character and buildings, but there also prevailed a “helpfulness and sympathy . . . born of the hard-pressing needs and the closely-linked common life.” This differed from older eastern communities, where “people have crystallized into a strong indifference to each other’s affairs, which, if [it] were analyzed, would be found to be nine parts selfishness.”⁵² Like other western defenders, she believed the West would be different from the East. Surrounded by a benevolent and beautiful natural environment, westerners could lead a purer and more genuine life. In her 1874 essay “Colorado Springs” she declared, “There is to be born of these plains and mountains, all along the great central plateaus of [the] continent, the very best life, both physical and mental, of the coming centuries.” Like an echo of antiquity, Colorado would be home to “patriarchal families living with their herds, as patriarchs lived of old on the eastern plains [in the Middle East].” “Of such life, such blood,” Jackson continued, “comes culture of a few generations later—a culture all the better because it comes spontaneously and not of effort, is a growth and not a graft.” Reinforcing this return to the patriarchs of yesterday and their resurrection in the West, she concluded, “It was in the east that the wise men saw the star; but it was westward to a high mountain, in a lonely place, that the disciples were led for the transfiguration!”⁵³ Comparing Coloradans to the shepherds of the Bible seemed a bit presumptuous, and clearly there was a racial and ethnic element to her observations. The blood, a signifier of racial and ethnic composition, set Coloradans literally apart, and Colorado’s altitude put them a mile closer to heaven. In both cases, this made them better (and racially purer) than people in the East.

The pioneer farmer as an iconic American figure had already established himself by the nineteenth century, and westerners keenly used the myth of the hardworking and moral farmer to their advantage. William Gilpin, a former Colorado territorial governor and Denver promoter, stressed that western emigrants resembled an orderly, peaceful, and disciplined army planting an “empire in the wilderness by a system of colonization at once perfect and inscrutable.” Pushed by the tens of thousands of immigrants from the Old World (themselves the chosen, hardest-working members of their nations, Gilpin claimed), “our own people . . . perpetually move up to recruit and reinforce the pioneers.”⁵⁴ These new pioneers invariably derived from the fittest members of society, and their vigor, Gilpin believed, would create a powerful city at the base of the Rocky Mountains.

Joseph Pomeroy Widney claimed to have studied the racial superiority and biological fitness of immigrants to the West, and, like Hunt and Gilpin, he believed westerners were a breed apart. The pioneers, he claimed, were “a people tall, erect, spare, not an ounce of superfluous flesh, full-chested, clean-limbed, head narrow rather than broad, of the dolichocephalous type, features inclined to the aquiline cast, hair straight, eye[s] keen, alert, restless.” They had descended from the rugged trans-Appalachian frontiersmen, the men “who for generations had served as a bumper between the steadily advancing civilization of the Atlantic coast and the wild Indian who was forced back before it.”⁵⁵ These pioneering sons of pioneers displayed not only great bravery but also admirable intelligence, growing up to be men like George Rogers Clark, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln—esteemed company indeed.⁵⁶ Conflict and the rigors of the frontier had made these men the proto-typical Americans, while in the East “people [were] influenced and tinged by the constant influx of alien blood.” European ideas, values, and even languages constantly molded easterners. The westerner differed because “his blood yearly is becoming more purely America; for he is breeding out the inherited types.”⁵⁷ The westerner had no memory of Europe and therefore no compunction to follow its effete values and culture.

Charles Benedict Davenport, a leading eugenicist, outlined how migration could strengthen a group or a race, and he used the West as an example. Migrations “have a profound eugenic significance. The most active, ambitious, and courageous blood migrates. It migrated to America and has made her what she has become; in America another selection took place in the western migrations, and what this best blood—this crème de la crème—did in the West all the world knows.”⁵⁸ Similarly, a Denver and Rio Grande promotional pamphlet, extolling Colorado’s considerable virtues, claimed, “Colorado’s people are picked from the best communities in the world, and they come this long distance because here they find the best opportunities for health and wealth, and many are attracted by our superb climate. Colorado is just far enough from the denser settlements of the country not to attract the indolent and the shiftless . . . the intelligence and morality of our people is far above the average.”⁵⁹

Charles Nordhoff, in California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence, first published in the 1870s, predicted greatness for California because its superior population outshone that of eastern cities. New York, according to Nordhoff, deserved credit as the true frontier because there civilized Anglo-Americans came into contact with European immigrants of the basest sort, and the immigrants were clearly winning. “New York receives,” Nordhoff wrote, “a constant supply of the rudest, least civilized European populations; that of the immigrants landed at Castle Garden, the neediest, the least thrifty and energetic, and the most vicious remain in New York, while the ablest and most valuable fly rapidly westward . . . [where they became members of California’s] settled permanent population.”⁶⁰

Even the Chinese, Nordhoff declared, proved more desirable than the teeming masses of immigrants flooding eastern cities because at least they could read their native language and knew their place in society. Nordhoff described meeting an original forty-niner who explained that a kind of natural selection accounted for California’s superiority to the East. The pioneer, now a wealthy banker, explained, “When gold was discovered . . . wherever an Eastern family had three or four boys, the ablest, the most energetic one, came hither. Of that great multitude of picked men, again, the weakly broke down under the strain; they died of disease or bad whiskey, or they returned home. The remainder you see here, and you ought not to wonder that they are above your Eastern average in intelligence, energy, and thrift.”⁶¹

Americans considered intelligence, energy, and thrift the most desirable characteristics, the traits that made America great. These marked the very traits Richard Henry Dana had found lacking in Hispanic Californians, a deficiency he attributed to California’s climate. Nordhoff’s banker saw things differently. He stressed that California’s population did not roam because few wanted to return to the East, and they could go no farther west than California. California and the West, therefore, had the best and fittest members of the Anglo population. Even the region’s non-Anglo immigrants surpassed their countrymen in the East because of their vigor and ambition. All in all, the banker concluded, “We have much less of a frontier population than . . . [exists] in New York.”⁶²

The positive influence of migration was also described in John Hanson Beadle’s The Undeveloped West. California, he declared, would be great because of the influence of the diversity of its population and the influence of migration on improving settlers: “The future Californians will probably be the most inventive race in the world; for only the most resolute settled the country at first, only the most skillful succeeded, and their situation was such as to make invention and contrivance a necessity. Still more will this result from a mixture of races; that state of facts which has made the American what he is, exists tenfold more in California.”⁶³

A generation later, David Starr Jordan similarly declared that westward movement had created a superior human being in California. In a 1908 article in Sunset magazine, Jordan declared, “In my judgment the essential source of Californianism lies in heredity. The Californian of to-day is of the type of his father of fifty years ago. The Argonauts of ’49 were buoyant, self-reliant, adequate, reckless, thoroughly individualistic, capable of all adjustments, careless of conventions, eager to enjoy life and action. And we, their sons, with all admixture of other blood of other temperament are still made in their image. It is blood which tells.”⁶⁴

The winnowing process of migration would seem to have been undermined by new technologies. The West, following the completion of the transcontinental railroad, could be easily accessed by even the least vigorous. Yet a promoter as gifted as Charles Fletcher Lummis could find a way to perpetuate the argument put forth by Nordhoff and others. Lummis turned to the free market to explain the West’s continued domination by desirable peoples. The West’s “transcontinental spaces, the size of fares, the far greater cost of land [were all influential] in determining (by elimination) the extraordinary average of the new California in morals, intelligence, and property. Not only has something attracted a desirable class; something has rather warded the undesirables.”⁶⁵ Western migration demanded a robust physique and a robust bank account, neither of which recent immigrants possessed.

Though western boosters desired native-born Americans, they accepted immigrants who settled in the region as somehow superior to their countrymen in the East and more willing to assimilate into American culture. The West, so the argument went, compelled immigrants to rapidly abandon their old national and ethnic identities and become American. No less a voice than Frederick Jackson Turner articulated this belief in his famous 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that the rapid assimilation of immigrants into American culture merely illustrated the benevolent power of the frontier. The frontier was the defining feature in American history, a place that provided an outlet for excess population, a home for grassroots democracy, and a fertile land to feed a hungry nation. Turner declared, “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” There, at the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” the immigrant, as many worried, did temporarily become a little savage as he traded the “railroad car” for the “birch canoe.” Huddled in clearings hewn from the woods by vanishing Indians, following faint Indian trails, and planting Indian corn, the European immigrant slowly became like an Indian, finding the frontier environment “at first too strong for the man.” This changed, however, as slowly, steadily, the settler pushed back the wilderness and brought forth civilization. By this time, after years of struggle, he had left behind his European background and emerged transfigured as an American.⁶⁶ Turner, in stark contrast to Washington Irving’s early-nineteenth-century analysis, looked back on the era of frontier expansion as the formative experience in American history. Like Widney, Turner believed each successive period of frontier settlement diluted the European influence. The Atlantic Coast settlements acted as “the frontier of Europe,” but with each generation “the frontier became more and more American.”⁶⁷ Turner’s view, while perhaps partly nostalgia, reflected the fin de siècle transformation in people’s attitudes about the West as a place. No longer did the frontier represent something fearful; it now defined the meaning of American.

Americans recognized the difficult labor inherent in frontier life, especially farming, and they saw hard work as a desirable trait in immigrants to the West. Americans admired those immigrants because their hard work literally made the desert bloom. In their work ethnic, many western writers declared, immigrants far outmatched native-born Americans. Frederick Law Olmsted, writing in the 1850s, found immigrants in Texas the hardest-working and most able people in the state. The German immigrants in towns like Neu Branfels, he explained, were poor but industrious, and their fortunes improved each year because of their hard work. They lived in small but well-made houses, with neat fields surrounding them that stood in stark contrast to “the patches of corn-stubble, overgrown with crab-grass, which are usually the only gardens to be seen adjoining the cabins of the poor whites and slaves.”⁶⁸ This progress, Olmsted asserted, resulted from free labor and a work ethic that made these Germans the equals of the best native-born citizens.

In the late 1870s James Rusling similarly witnessed immigrant labor as transformative in Missouri. They elevated the state from the degenerate condition in which it had existed during slavery: “All along the route, it was plain to be seen, Missouri had suffered sadly from slavery. But the wave of immigration, now that slavery was dead, had already reached her, and we found its healthful currents everywhere overflowing her bottoms and prairies.” Vigorous and industrious Germans and Yankees inhabited land that had once known only white laziness and black slave labor. The desirability of freedom-loving, hardworking German immigrants was self-evident, Rusling argued: “The sturdy Rhine-men, as true to freedom as in the days of Tacitus, were already everywhere planting vineyards, and in the near future were sure of handsome returns from petty farms, that our old time ‘Pikes’ and ‘Border Ruffians’ would have starved on.”⁶⁹ He found many of the same characteristics in the German population of Anaheim, California: “Here were some five hundred or more Germans, all industriously engaged, and exhibiting of course their usual sagacity and thrift. They had constructed acequias, and carried the hitherto useless Santa Anna River everywhere—around through their lots, and past every door; they had hedged their little farms with willows, and planted them with vines, orange, lemon, and olive trees; and the once barren plains in summer were now alive with perpetual foliage and verdure.” Their settlement resembled “a bit of Germany, dropped down on the Pacific Coast. It has little in common with Los Angelos [sic] the dirty, but the glorious climate and soil, and was an agreeable surprise [in] every way.”⁷⁰ From Texas to Missouri to California, these industrious immigrants transformed the landscape, putting down roots and rapidly remade these places into the white man’s West.

The transformative power of the West and its need for good, hardworking immigrants was the subject of a 1910 article by Herbert Kaufman in the magazine Everybody’s, titled “Southwestward Ho!” The essay extolled the virtues of immigrant settlement in Texas and Oklahoma. Ideally, Kaufman declared, young Americans would finally turn their backs on the corrupt and evil cities and return to the countryside. Despite being raised in urban enclaves, these young people would unconsciously remember their agrarian ancestral past: “They are Americans, the native-born, the sons and the daughters of pioneer strain, hearkening to the impulse which in another day drove forth their forbear[s].”⁷¹ Yet they did not return in great enough numbers to alleviate the Southwest’s “help problem.” Kaufman continued: “The native whites will not enter service. Colored help is insolent and inefficient. But this simply means the coming of the immigrant girl, who in turn will lead her man after her; and both will benefit the region.”⁷² The best solution to the immigrant problem, Kaufman declared, was to divert Eastern European immigration to Galveston: “Italy could empty herself into Texas alone, and Texas would still have room for Germany and France to boot.”⁷³ Italians and other “Latins,” considered a scourge in other parts of the country, could easily adapt to Texas’s warm climate (since they were from the warm Mediterranean), and they would quickly assimilate into American society, benefiting Texas and the nation.

Immigrants’ thrift, industry, and desire for hard work made them acceptable to westerners, many of whom believed that only these kinds of immigrants should settle in the region. Yet hard work would not necessarily allow westerners to appreciate groups that seemed too radically different. Westerners singled out the Chinese and the Mormons of Utah as undesirable, despite their work ethics. The former were racially too different and the latter acolytes of religious heresy in the minds of most Americans. Regardless of their willingness to labor, westerners roundly discriminated against the Chinese. James G. Eastman, the orator of Los Angeles’s centennial celebration in 1876, for example, declared that the nation had room for “the ingenious Swiss, the practical Englishman, the polished Frenchman, the philosophic German, the gallant Spaniard, the busy, country-loving Irishman, and the sturdy Swede.” These Europeans worked hard and appreciated freedom and democracy. America would remain a haven, he declared, “to all who come with brain or muscle or skill to enjoy the blessings of our government because they believe in its principles and love its doctrines, and desire to contribute to its success, the invitation is irrevocable, and the doors are open forever. They are brothers in blood, in thought, in aspiration and inheritance.” The Chinese, by contrast, were inclined to idolatry, consented to monarchy, and despised American values and institutions, Eastman claimed. He concluded, “This grand continent, with its civilization and wondrous development, its cultivating valleys and happy homes, is not the lap into which China may spew its criminals and paupers, its invalids and idiots, its surplus moral and physical leprosy.”⁷⁴

Even worse, as many observers asserted, the Chinese could survive on very little. Edwin R. Meade, in the explorer F. V. Hayden’s popular book on the West, declared that the Chinese would hurt white laborers: “It is impossible that the white laborer can persist in the presence of these conditions [low Chinese wage rates]. Not only substantial food, comfortable clothing, and decent household accommodations are necessary to him, but his family must be supported in a respectable manner and schooling and religious training be provided for his children. These latter have become essential, and are the glory of our race and nation.”⁷⁵ The Chinese, conversely, lived in a largely male society sans families and children, an arrangement intolerable for whites. To resolve the matter, Meade argued, laws should forever ban Chinese immigration to the United States.

Not everyone adamantly opposed the Chinese. James Rusling, for example, argued that the Chinese would assimilate in time and until then would provide a much-needed labor source to develop the West Coast: “The first generation passed away, the next[,] de-Chinaized, Americanized, and educated, would soon become absorbed in the national life . . . As the ocean receives all rains and rivers, and yet shows it not, so America receives the Saxon and the Celt, the Protestant and the Catholic, and can yet receive the Sambo and John, and absorb them all.” Setting aside the obviously demeaning racial epithets, Rusling nevertheless advocated for a multiracial society. This society could be achieved, he asserted, by American institutions: “The school-house and the church, the newspaper and the telegraph, can be trusted to work out their logical results; and time, our sure ally, would shape and fashion even these [Chinese] into keen American citizens.”⁷⁶ Rusling’s relatively egalitarian and progressive view, however, gained little public support, and legislation soon prevented Chinese entry into the nation with the passage of several acts, most notably the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, that forbade their entry into the United States. Their laudable thrift and hard work could not, in the end, overcome Americans’ widespread opposition.⁷⁷

At the fin de siècle, westerners sought to create a civilization in which Anglo-Americans could find refuge from a changing world. Westerners argued for the superiority of their region because it lacked the racial and ethnic problems of the rest of the country. Undesirable immigrants wielded power in the East, overwhelming native-born Americans, but the difficulty and expense of western migration prevented a massive influx of these undesirable citizens. Anglo-Americans could, however, embrace desirable immigrants if they worked hard and could be easily assimilated into American culture. The Chinese in particular differed too much to be welcomed into the West by most Anglo-American westerners.

The West, especially California and the Southwest, nevertheless remained the home of the nation’s largest populations of American Indian peoples, Hispanics, and Asians (both the Chinese and, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, an increasing number of Japanese). This diversity might appear to give lie to the imagining of the West as a white man’s homeland. Western image makers, however, romanticized and appropriated these cultures, adding an exotic veneer over the political and social domination of Anglo-Americans. In comparison, they argued, the East seemed doomed to sink under the weight of inferior white but non-Anglo immigrants. Explaining this process, showing that the ills of industrialization and non-Anglo immigration did not affect the West, proved to be the last stage in the intellectual and imagined creation of the white man’s West.