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About a dozen years ago, I started working on a book which has never been written, although I've managed to milk the topic for articles and speeches.
The working title was Is Denver Necessary?
The
book was supposed to be was an examination of the
relationship between the urban West and the rural West. The
mythic west is rural -- those wide-open spaces. The real
West is one of the most urbanized parts of the United
States.
Most of what we think of as rural is just an extension of the urban. Those cows in the pasture wouldn't be there without cities -- somebody's got to buy that beef, or there won't be any money to pay the cowboys. The same holds for the barley in the field, or the mine on the hillside, or the sawmill in the valley -- generally they serve distant urban markets.
A century ago, Denver's leaders saw that relationship clearly. They supported water projects for farmers, established food processing plants, built and rescued railroads. But by 1990, that relationship appeared to have changed. Denver wasn't showing much in the way of regional leadership, and its old hinterlands seemed to be moving off on their own.
Documenting those perceptions is heavy work, but the more research I did, the more I saw a bigger picture. Think of the U.S., not as the official union of states, but as a set of regions, most of them led by a city, that are competing with each other for power and resources.
Go back to 1846 when St. Louis was the dominant city for the American West. Chihuahua was the dominant city for La Frontera del Norte. They clashed over who would control the region -- the conflict is known to history as the Mexican War.
After America got the territory, how would it be organized? As big plantations run by slave labor? Or as small family farms? Would it be tapped by a railroad from a slave zone like St. Louis, Memphis or New Orleans? Or by a railroad from free-soil Chicago?
That conflict was known as the question of expansion
of slavery into the territories,
and then as the Civil
War. While the South was absent from Congress, the northern
Republicans were free to practice large-scale social
engineering on the new territory: the Homestead Act for
family farms, the Pacific Railroad so they could get their
goods to market, the Morrill Act for land-grant colleges so
they'd know how to get the most from their farms.
Thus after the Civil War, the Mountain West was organized as part of the Midwest -- a big extension of Chicago. Things were changing a decade ago, though, and I saw a new player on the scene: the West Coast.
Instead of selling commodities through the Hog Butcher of the World, we were selling experiences to tourists from the City of Dreams. L.A. was dumping its city trash with unit trains to Utah, and fouling the skies of Arizona to generate its electricity. Thousands of Californians were moving to Colorado every month. Our economy, and by extension our view of the world, was leaving Chicago and moving to L.A.
At the time, I considered one other contender.
Texas was big, rich and distinct. But oil prices were down, its cholesterol-laden cuisine was fading in popularity, its hard-shell fundamentalism was getting trounced in elections. So I figured that Texas was in relative decline, and unlikely to be expanding its influence much past Oklahoma and eastern New Mexico -- and the California influence was growing every day. Colorado voted like California in 1992, not like Texas.
And historically, even though Texas is the closest seacoast, Colorado has exported and imported through the Great Lakes and the West Cost. In early days, the Comanche had isolated Texas from the Rocky Mountains, and government transportation programs built east-west routes, not north-south routes.
So in retrospect, I had decent reasons to be wrong. But
I was still wrong. The Lone Star State is known to some
cultural geographers as Imperial Texas,
and the
appellation fits.
We have an oil-man president going to war to control oil resources halfway around the world. On our home front, the oil industry drills for coal-bed methane where and how it pleases, with encouragement from Washington. Our governor is from Texas. The Lone Star brand of fundamentalism infects many of our public debates, and red meat seems to be gaining against boneless skinned chicken breast.
So it's probably just as well I never wrote that book. Here I was worrying about L.A. taking over Colorado, and the real force was Imperial Texas, imposing its economy and culture not just on Colorado, but on America, and perhaps the rest of the world.
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