REVIEWS

Vision and Place: John Wesley Powell and Reimagining the Colorado River Basin

Edited by Jason Robison, Daniel McCool, and Thomas Minckley

Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. xxv + 317 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $34.95

The sesquicentennial of John Wesley Powell’s epic 1869 trip down the Green and Colorado rivers inspired this anthology’s editors to ask the question: how do Powell’s ideas about the Colorado River Basin and the West stand up a century-and-a-half later? To answer it, they divided the book into Powell’s three main professional interests—water, public lands, and Native Americans—and let numerous scholars sort out the rest. Throughout, the authors do not just restrict themselves to the past and present. They give us much to chew on in looking forward. As the twelve excellent chapters included herein show, there is still much to learn—negatively and positively—from the one-armed Civil War veteran. Sometimes Powell’s vision peered through the fog and beyond; other times the fog of his time clouded his view.

Thus, the scholars who wrote each chapter take a facet of Powell’s writing, thinking, or actions, hold it up to the present, and see how it bears up now. Robert W. Adler, for example, examines Powell’s advocacy for the development of water resources by communities in what we now call watersheds, rather than by big government or big capital. Adler’s chapter and the eleven others offer fascinating insights, are well written, and are well researched.

Powell’s greatest relevance to our times was in showing the environmental reality of the Colorado River Basin and the Intermountain West; namely, that its aridity would always be a limiting factor. And Powell’s communitarian approach to water resources is not dead, as a case study of the Dolores River by Amorina Lee-Martinez and Patricia Limerick demonstrates. The Bureau of Reclamation has mostly followed Powell’s idea to construct reservoirs at higher locations because most farms sit at lower elevations. Finally, as Jack Schmidt eloquently notes in his afterword, and as other scholars mention throughout, Powell always made a strong case for using science and rational planning to plot the future of land and water issues.

Despite his prophetic skills, Powell was all too human and often got it wrong. As numerous authors point out, he did not foresee the ways in which land and water agencies would have to account for environmental factors like beach preservation in the Grand Canyon or endangered species like the Colorado pikeminnow. Nor could he have foreseen the recreation boom of the post–World War II era that even took his riveting account of his 1869 trip as a sort of wild-river bible. These are just a few of the ways Powell, like almost all of us, was hemmed in by his times.

Perhaps the most important topic covered within these chapters is that of Native Americans. Unlike many of Powell’s ideas about water, which were ignored in his day and ours, his influence as the head of the Bureau of Ethnology mattered then and matters now. Even though Powell was somewhat progressive for his time in being an assimilationist (rather than an annihilationist), he appears very ethnocentric, even racist, now. Powell certainly acknowledged the extraordinary diversity of Native American tribes and was no social Darwinist, but he always presumed the superiority of Euro-American civilization. The only thing missing from this section, from a Utah point of view, is an assessment of what Powell contributed to the scholarship of Numic-speaking tribes, namely the Utes and Paiutes.

Every one of these essays contributes significantly to the discussion, and it is hard to say which is best. Two of them held personal interest to me: William Debuys’s chapter, “Stewart Udall, John Wesley Powell, and the Emergence of a National Commons,” and Weston McCool’s and Daniel McCool’s chapter on Powell and Native Americans, “‘We Must Either Protect Him or Destroy Him.’”

In addition to twelve fine chapters, the editors provide important contextual essays that introduce each of the three sections. Plus, the renowned legal scholar Charles Wilkinson and the legendary river geomorphologist Jack Schmidt write a wonderful foreword and afterword, respectively.

This book is timely because the Colorado River Basin currently faces its toughest rapids, particularly because of climate change. The scholars here expertly use Powell to guide us into the “Great Unknown.” Buy this book, read it, and listen closely.

James M. Aton

—Southern Utah University

“Feed My Sheep”: The Life of Alberta Henry

By Colleen Whitley

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xiv + 228 pp. Cloth, $34.95

Twentieth-century women in Utah, especially those who are not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, rarely get their due in historical literature. In “Feed My Sheep,” Colleen Whitley aims to introduce readers to a powerful and influential woman named Alberta Henry. Born to a sharecropping family in Louisiana, Henry’s life brought her to Utah; her participation and involvement with Black churches and communities of color in the state led her to a life of activism and the presidency of the Utah chapter of the NAACP. The legacy that she built in Utah brought many people into her life, including Colleen Whitley, the author and compiler of this biography. The image that Whitley creates of Henry is that she was somewhat of a reluctant hero. Opportunities to serve and advocate for minority students and communities always found Henry; she never had to apply for any of the many positions she held. As an African American woman active in the Baptist tradition, Alberta Henry answered the call to “feed my sheep” where she saw a need, and her activism was an extension of her faith. This biography is presented in an unusual format. In 1998, as an editor for a volume on significant women in twentieth-century Utah, Whitley began working on a chapter about Henry. Worth Their Salt, Too was published in 2000, after Henry had retired and was no longer the president of the NAACP. The two became friends as Whitley interviewed Henry and spent long hours poring over Henry’s papers. Henry hoped that these interviews would be used to construct the story of her life, but she unfortunately passed away before such a book could be produced. As a labor of love for her friend, Whitley took it upon herself to finish Henry’s biography and the result has been published by the University of Utah Press. Readers will quickly note that Henry’s voice is very present in the biography as Whitley included extensive passages from the oral history interviews that she conducted with Henry. These lengthy quotations are printed in a different font from the main text of the book and provide the volume with its framing structure.

Whitley weaves Henry’s oral history passages in with historical context, additional research, and commentary. This is not typical for a traditional biography, but it represents the way that Whitley was able to research her subject: through oral history interviews. However, this approach made Whitley dependent upon the information that Henry shared and the way that she shared it. And while memories are imperfect, it is significant that Henry’s own voice and experiences were the driving force in this narrative. For example, Whitley follows Henry’s reaction to the LDS church lifting the priesthood and temple ban for its members of Black African descent with contextual information about the racial restrictions in Latter-day Saint history.

Alberta Henry’s life underscores the importance of local history in the larger civil rights history, rightfully and effectively bringing the story of that movement westward. Henry’s life also demonstrates the hard work and activism that continued after national civil rights legislation had been passed and after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Some of her major contributions included supporting students through the youth NAACP program and pushing the Utah state legislature to follow

the federal government’s establishment of the Martin Luther King holiday. When the state sought to execute two Black men convicted of murder, she rallied for a stay of execution for William Andrews who had not killed anyone but had been an accomplice to the murders. Henry objected to the death penalty for Andrews on the grounds that execution was an extreme response that had not been pursued for white convicts like Mark Hoffman, who had also murdered multiple people.

While the format makes for an unconventional biography, Whitley has completed a critical work of local history that will be a tremendous resource on Black history and activism in the state of Utah. She has ensured that Alberta Henry’s contributions to Utah communities will not be forgotten now that researchers can access a biography of this notable woman containing her own words and memories.

Jessica M. Nelson

—Joseph Smith Papers

Color Coded: Party Politics in the American West, 1950–2016

By Walter Nugent

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. x + 374 pp. Cloth, $34.95

One of the main questions in American political development is how change happens. To explain how major political change happens when individuals are generally socialized into the political identities of their parents, scholars have developed the theory of realignment—the shift in voter preference from one party or affiliation to another. One failing in this theory is that we have not seen a national realignment since 1932. This causes many scholars to question the validity of the theory as an explanation for how an entire region or nation would shift from one party to another. However, it is clear that there was a post-1960s realignment in the southern states from predominantly Democratic to predominantly Republican. A corresponding, reactive realignment happened in the northeastern states from predominantly Republican to predominantly Democratic. These shifts were such that the political world changed drastically in the last sixty years in those two regions. While the verdict in political science is out on the value of realignment theory, understanding political change in regions is an important phenomenon to grasp.

Nugent’s work examines political change—or the lack thereof—in the western United States. Before reading this book, my sense of how western states had evolved was less developed than my sense of what had happened in the south and northeast. Generally, the work about political change focuses on a north-south frame and presents data about the eastern part of the country. Perhaps because political change did not happen uniformly across the western region, we missed the political transformation. Nugent shows that political change happened state by state and in unique ways: some states realigned, some states stayed the same over time, and some states have moved back and forth. Nugent provides a deep, rich history of states in the West, which is appealing to historians, but also makes use of available data, which is not always easy at a state level and is appealing to political scientists.

Focusing on state election data allows us to see what happens uniquely in a state over the years. Generally, election analyses focus on national elections (i.e., how Coloradoans vote in the presidential election), but down-ballot state and local contests reveal political change that is not visible at that national level. By focusing on the state data, such as gubernatorial races or state legislature seats, Nugent is able to flesh out how politics evolved specifically for the people of the western states. For example, Nugent lasers in on the northern “Panhandle” of Idaho as a locus of Democratic strength in a Republican state and can explain why. He does this for each state which provides thorough insights on each western state’s partisan affiliations. This nicely ties the work of Daniel Elazar, the political scientist who posited that there are political subcultures in states which can explain policy differences, to political development which explains how a state’s politics uniquely developed given the political culture present there.

This work is an excellent assessment of thousands of elections across seven decades in nineteen different states. Using this robust data analysis, Nugent categorizes “switchers” (states that have drifted from the Democratic to Republican camp, or vice versa), “stayers” (states that have remained reliably Republican or Democratic over the decades), and “swingers” (states that have gone back and forth throughout the years). In this way you can see how Montana is similar to Arizona, which may not be at all clear from a national lens. Nugent’s starting point—1950—situates this work squarely in relatively recent history, which makes his analysis useful to understand political developments continuing in the present day. Placing the spotlight on states that do not always get the attention in national scholarship adds to our fuller understanding of the dynamic politics in this country. Utah is one of the states that Nugent categorizes as a “stayer—reliably red,” which puts it in a group with Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Alaska. While readers may have originally lumped Utah in with Idaho, it is very interesting to place the state in a more diverse group for a variety of reasons. The “stayers” are all reliably red but Nugent points out that Utah is so for different reasons than Kansas. Students of Utah history will thoroughly enjoy the explanation of decades worth of data that lets us see the vibrant red of today’s Utah against the backdrop of seventy years of Republican Party victories.

Leah A. Murray

—Weber State University