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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY Dorman convincingly argues that the Dust Bowl and Okie Migration of the 1930s delegitimized nationalistic perceptions of the pioneering farmers’ nobility. Although Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane celebrated the pioneer in their Depression-era novels, John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and Carey McWilliams documented the exploitation of migrant workers by western farmers in a post-frontier era. Dorman highlights regionalist elements of the New Deal, including its encouragement of local artists and writers and Indian arts and crafts and its decentralized management of crop and rangelands under local grazing districts and soil conservation districts. He overlooks a striking irony of New Deal western regionalism: the New Deal’s best known explorations of local color—the photographs of Farm Security Administration (FSA) employees and the Bonneville Power Administration’s “Roll on Columbia” songs recorded by Woody Guthrie—were produced by outsiders. Most FSA photographers lightly touched the country they photographed as they passed through, while Guthrie moved to the Northwest for only a few weeks to write his songs about the Columbia River Valley. Regionalism took a backseat to nationalist patriotism and 100 Percent Americanism during the 1940s and 1950s. Then the cultural ferment and environmental activism of the 1960s and 1970s breathed new life into the regionalist picture as did the migration of millions of Americans into the Southwestern Sunbelt. The Amer ican Indian Movement’s calls for sovereignty, ecologists’ focus on the ecological integrity of bioregions, wilderness advocates’ criticism of federally subsidized grazing on the public lands, and the Sagebrush Rebels’ demand that the federal government cede control of the public lands to the states all reflected the regionalist spirit. Dorman describes a “New West renaissance” of the 1980s and 1990s in which historical scholarship, literature, film, and art criticized the underside of American imperial projects in the West. Readers with an interest in questions of regional identity and politics will relish this volume. BRIAN Q. CANNON Brigham Young University Plain but Wholesome: Foodways of the Mormon Pioneers. By Brock Cheney. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012. xiii + 210 pp. Paper, $19.95.) IN 1997 THE UTAH STATE Legislature passed a bill that designated the Dutch oven as the official state cooking pot. And yet, for nineteenthcentury Mormons, the Dutch oven of today did not exist. Brock Cheney’s Plain but Wholesome: Foodways of the Mormon Pioneers contains many delightful 294 |
