Bad Land: An American Romance, Jonathan Raban
Book Review
By
Tom Cahill
A year-and-a-half ago, a friend related to me his experiences looking for work as a political science professor. He had interviewed for jobs in Indiana, Georgia, and New England. I asked if he had looked for a position in the Rocky Mountain States. He replied he wasn't interested in working there because of the region's pronounced libertarianism. My friend should read Bad Land, An American Romance by Jonathan Raban.
Raban not only describes Eastern Montana's culture, he explains and contextualizes it. It stems, he writes, from the thousands of homesteaders – many of them fresh off the boat from Dublin, Oslo, Kiev, or Hamburg – who were gulled into believing they could transform Montana's desert into lush farmland but wound up bankrupt. They were lured to Montana, in part, by Hardy Campbell, a zealot for (in Raban's words) "Science, Progress, and the American Way." Campbell promoted "scientific farming for semi-arid lands" in his book Campbell's Soil Culture Manual. It promised to turn the near-deserts of Montana into "the richest portion of the United States... [meaning] better farm homes, happier farm families, better citizenship, and more nearly the ideal simple life."
Campbell's system was rooted in capillary attraction – the force that allows water in an upright tube placed in a bowl of water to withstand gravity and sprout above the level of the rest of the liquid in the bowl. Montana farmers hoped to manipulate the water on their soil to surge upward and sustain their crops.
The libertarianism my friend finds so vexing is promulgated by the region's history. As Raban writes, one example is the tendency of Westerners being twice as ready to believe that the moon landing was a hoax perpetrated by the government for the benefit of big corporations and contracted out to NASA:
Yet if one were looking for evidence to support the idea that the government was into scams of this magnitude one only had to remember the dryland homestead scheme. In 1909 the government did drop people into an expanse of land which looked suspiciously like the surface of the moon. The scheme had been pushed through Congress largely for the benefit of the powerful railroad companies. If people in the West now showed a disproportionate mistrust of government and big corporations, they had in their history one event, at least, that they could hold up in triumphant proof of their cynical imaginings.
Or, as Dale Brown, one of the Montanans Raban encounters, says: "You have to wonder what the government was up to, the way they shipped people out here, to just about the poorest damned land in the whole United States.
The Montana Raban reveals in Bad Land is one where hunters clean game in their rooms. It is a state where some of the more unbridled fundamentalist churches flourish. In one of the most insightful observations in the book, Raban elucidates the connection between Montana's violent weather and extreme climate, and the savage and intense Protestant fundamentalism of rural America. Raban, the son of an Anglican priest was raised to believe in a tweedy, mild-mannered father figure – a "temperate, maritime and clement God."
Raban's father preached a Christianity with an antiseptic Crucifixion (the epicenter of the religion) and almost bereft of the Book of Revelation. But Montana, "a landscape ideally suited to the staging of the millennium... A land of earthquakes, deluges, hurricanes, lightning strikes, forest fires and grotesque extremes of heat and cold," does not have a tidy, moderate, or gentle Christianity. Montana's Christianity is what a friend of mine calls "Old Testament Christianity," a religion of plagues, locusts, hellfire, and the rapture.
Raban believes the region's religious climate is the main reason for the reaction of the Rocky Mountain West to the siege and destruction of David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas, in the early months of 1993. "When westerners watched the confrontation at Waco on CNN," Raban writes, "they could see their own family histories reflected in the Koresh place in the scrubland of Texas... it was as if the family homestead was being violated. People felt tender for the Koreshites – not merely out of some Neanderthal dogma about property rights, but because their sense of themselves was under siege."
Waco affected Westerners because many recalled their parents and grandparents moving out west to escape from the East and worship their god in unconventional ways; in fact, Koresh's compound "would look like a lot like grandpa's farm – where, perhaps Armageddon was just as eagerly awaited as it was in Waco."
Raban's book, while not a political treatise by any means, provides its readers with a decent understanding of the sagebrush rebellion of the 1990s. He demonstrates the perceived arrogance of bureaucrats who have been telling Montanans what to do and how to do it since 1912 when, as Raban demonstrates by utilizing the journal of a rancher who attended the lecture, a Prairie County Extension agent pontificated about tree planting. Raban reveals the resentment that the people of Eastern Montana have accumulated toward the contempt shown towards them by the East Coast intelligentsia. An example of this contempt is Grant Wood's American Gothic, the celebrated picture of a farmer, his wife, and his pitchfork, "a prankish Manhattan view of life down on the farm, where simple country folk read bibles and chew on straws."
A more recent example of this contempt is the scheme of a pair of Rutgers University students who decided that eastern Montana would be the ideal place for the American bison and should be given back to them. "They opened a book," a Montanan explains, "didn't bother to read between the lines – and figured they could reinvent the old frontier here. The Wild West, where the buffalo roam... Then we realized they were serious. The government was financing studies on it."
Click here to buy Bad Land, An American Romance online.
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