Empire by Another Name: The Presidency and the Rise of Federal Power

August 10, 2025

Acclaimed historian Patricia Limerick joins host Gil Troy to explore how presidential power was reshaped by the relentless march of America’s westward expansion. Beneath the lofty rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, they uncover the practical realities of conquest, dispossession, and the explosive growth of federal authority needed to drive it forward.

Tracing how frontier dreams gave rise to federal sprawl – and how Jeffersonian ideals collided with the machinery of land offices, standing armies, and Interior departments – Limerick brings wit and nuance to a story too often flattened into myth.

This is the expansion of power – executive, federal, and destined to reshape the world.

Patty Limerick (00:04)

The United States was supposed to be the nation that rebelled against empire and centralized power. And then within, I’m going to say a few hours after the successful revolution, the United States had to say, we have a contiguous land empire of our own. The great issue for every president is when will the nation get too big? How big can a democratic republic be before it’s not gonna work?

Gil Troy (00:38)

Welcome from the Shapell Manuscript Foundation to the Human Side of History podcast with Professor Gil Troy. I’m Gil Troy. —– From the original 13 colonies to 50 states today, from territorial expansion to space exploration and now the digital revolution America has always been about the next frontier. This has been a way for America to exercise some of its greatest visions and its greatest ideals, but also sometimes has been the forum where some of America’s greatest failures came through.

And today we’re lucky to have Patricia Limerick, an American historian, an author, a lecturer and teacher, a MacArthur fellow from 1995 to 2000, and an appointee to the National Council of Humanities. She’s one of the leading historians of the American West. Her 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, was a pathbreaking reinterpretation of the Wild West and is a true pleasure to teach to students even after all these years. Over the years she’s actually not been afraid to don a clown’s mask and play the fool for her students and to bring joy into the often far too serious halls of academy. And so it’s an honor. Welcome, Patty, to the show.

Patty Limerick (01:54)

Well thank you. What a great introduction. It had so many dimensions. If we could speak briefly of Western civilization and its glories, certainly the Shakespearean tradition of the fool would be one that would rank very high there. But anyway, thank you very much for that introduction. And I really appreciate the recognition that I try to cover the bases. I try to cover the things that produced prosperity and opportunity for many and the things that produced injury and loss for some others and all the people in the middle who had some combination of the benefits and the challenges.

Gil Troy (02:29)

And maybe if we can speak this way, it’s a bit generational because I think there was an older generation which only told us about the good and only built the myth. And there’s a younger generation which sometimes is so stuck in the failures that they can’t even explain how we possibly could have progressed. And I think one of your great gifts to American history and broader to American academia is that ability to have the balance because first of all, it’s just more interesting. And secondly, it’s closer to the truth.

Patty Limerick (02:56)

As if that truth would ever hold still and let us go hug it. That truth is so mobile..

Gil Troy (03:00)

Right, or the truths. And by the way, that’s role of the fool, right? The fool has the ability to cut through that and be honest. As you were speaking about the fool, I was also thinking about Nancy Reagan and her complaint that during the Iran troubles, she would sit with the most powerful men in America outside the Oval Office. And they were saying, President Reagan has to address this. He’s making a mistake. And as soon as they walked into the Oval Office, she said they became little boys again and they didn’t have the nerve to be the fool, which actually takes a certain courage to speak the truth.

Patty Limerick (03:33)

I will say, I’m sure this comes up in your conversations, but it’s certainly my feeling that humor, even on very difficult issues, can be the WD-40 that loosens up the jammed up parts. And I’m sure you would be, I will just, I’ll put forward the Limerick hypothesis, which is that there is some, maybe just correlation, nothing like causation, but at least correlation between presidential success and capacity for humor.

Gil Troy (04:01)

And as you say that, I think of Franklin Roosevelt, right, who had the ability to kind of turn things into witticisms, if not, you know, hearty, jokes. And Ronald Reagan, right, who often used his jokes.

Patty Limerick (04:11)

Yeah. Yeah. Totally, totally. I know this is not where we wanted to go here, but I love the story. My favorite, favorite story was when, okay, we’ve all been sitting up on platforms where someone is giving a speech and we’re, we have to be very careful not to move our chair and fall off the platform. So Reagan was giving a speech once and Nancy Reagan, I’m sure she was very good at sitting on platforms, but she did go off the edge there and that interrupted his speech and everyone fluttered around and she was fine. She was fine. But when Reagan went back to the podium, he turned to her and he said, Nancy, I told you never to do that unless I was in trouble with the speech.I love that story.

Gil Troy (04:50)

And what could Reagan do? Reagan and Tip O’Neill were able to be very intense partisan political opponents, but they also could put it aside and have a drink and share bad Irish jokes, back in the day when you could use ethnic humor. So in the spirit of the positive and the negative, let’s go to one of the more famous quotations in American history before we get to the presidency. John O’Sullivan talking in 1845 about manifest destiny, which today is sometimes a trigger term.

“Texas is now ours. Her star and her stripe may already be said to have taken their place in the glorious blazon of our common nationality. And the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land. She’s no longer to us a mere geographical space, a certain combination of coast, plain, mountain, valley, forest and stream. She is no longer to us a mere country on the map. She comes within the dear and sacred designation of our country. Other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves in the spirit of hostile interference against us for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent, allotted by providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

What I love about this quote, not just poetry, but it goes from the power of land to the power of identity. And before we get to the costs, let’s talk about the upside. Let’s talk about how that quotation and that vision brought out the best in America and helped us develop, and then we’ll see the price we sometimes had to pay for that to be achieved.

Patty Limerick (06:40)

Yes, I will just anticipate something I’ll say in a moment, which is that those darned young historians, they’re younger than you are, heaven’s sake, and they’re certainly younger than I am, they keep turning up new, interesting, well, in this case, evidence, but also absence of evidence. So just how much that phrase, manifest destiny, actually caught on is really an interesting thing. And a historian, University of Kansas, Andrew Eisenberg, I’m jumping ahead and saying this, but he has done a, he and his protege Thomas Richard have written very interesting studies that prove the point of why we’re having this conversation here, that it was the desire for land that was the primary motivation. And very comparatively few settlers, pioneers, whatever we would call them, picked up the phrase manifest destiny. Now, how do you prove an absence? That’s not the easiest thing in the world, but there seems to be a great moment there for John O’Sullivan, boy.

There he is, he’s holding forth, he’s full of words and they’re very expansive and exuberant words, but did they actually influence that many people? Has turned out to be a very interesting question raised by these younger historians. So it does validate the premise of our conversation today though, that these younger scholars say it was really about the acquisition of land and good heavens for people from Europe.

The notion that you could have land and property and that your dignity and your living could rest on that ownership, that was intoxicating is not the right word. it was just unparalleled than any other situation that they would ever have known in their life in Europe to think that they could have a chance at owning land. So if we decode the phrase manifest destiny, that’s the code.

It’s rather simple that for manifest destiny substitute access to the ownership of land. And then you’ve got the driving motive. And speaking of my efforts to capture that complexity, one of my chapters in Legacy of Conquest, I wrote in the most, you may remember that I’m quite an earnest person. I really do have a lot of earnestness in me. And so I thought I needed to write this and this would have been 1986 that I was writing this.

A chapter on the white settlers, Anglo-American settlers, ends with a couple of sentences that I’ll paraphrase. In a time when we hear condemnations of the moral horror that was Westward expansion, that is not my words, I’m caricaturing others. When we hear those denunciations, we must remember that the great majority of these people wanted to find opportunity, make a living, and support families.

So that’s me, 1986. You can see what an impact I had on everybody. I mean, I don’t know. It just was so easy to default back to a sense of malevolent intention or desire to bring misery to Indian people, which some Anglo-Americans had. No doubt about that. But the notion that these people were actually given an opportunity that simply would never have figured in their lives by heading west and sometimes getting ahead of treaties, getting ahead of the proper provisions, sometimes quite within the legally created system, pretty recently improvised at that point. Anyway, that’s the story. 

Gil Troy (10:17)

Go west, was the key to prosperity,. Right? From landless to landed. One of my favorite stories is a story of an Irish immigrant who says, oh we have meat once a day. And one of his buddies says, what are you talking about? We have meat three times a day. My parents won’t even believe that we have meat once a day. And so he had to kind of soft pedal the truth because the luxuries of America, the glories of America, the people of plenty was a power. And it has created what we call the first mass middle-class civilization. But it also came at a price. Give us a little bit about the price, because that was your path breaking work. You were building off of this image of the Wild West and the old myth that everyone was addicted to. And it’s important to acknowledge some of the constructive truths behind that. But what were some of the prices that were also paid.

Patty Limerick (11:02)

Well, that’s a pretty long list. And my understanding is that Benjamin Franklin created a thing called Franklinian algebra where you could put positives on one side and negatives on the other. And somehow or other, would have some, this is before the invention of the spreadsheet, but you would have some way of putting things together with that. I’m not sure I’ve ever pulled that off. So I will now say that, positive side again one more time, that this transformed the lives of innumerable people. And it is also true that the Homestead Act, for instance, had a tremendous level of failure. So a lot of people who took the promise, moved to the West, put everything they had into it, in hopes, but also whatever meager capital they had, the failure rate of homesteads was very high. So this is just staying in terms of the prices paid by the Euro- Americans. So very high expectations in many cases and the higher the expectations, the harder the fall. Same for mining. If you get a, head to the West to get a mining claim to own that mining claim, that little segment of land, then there’s a pretty good chance, really good chance in the 19th century, that you’ll end up a wage worker if you stay in mining. You probably think, well, that didn’t work out and go somewhere else. So that promise that didn’t come through is very widespread among Euro-Americans and really, we, how do we, well, we’re having a little trouble as a nation here in how we allocate empathy but I don’t really know how you can keep from empathizing with a person who went to the California gold rush, left his family behind, wrote melancholy letters, took forever for a letter to come back and forth. Melancholy letters saying, say hello to mother if she is still alive. -Heavens- How are they ever to feel anything, but what have I done and why did I do it if it turns out that they don’t find the fortune, which is by far the majority experience. So, okay, so that’s one big set.

Then there’s the fact that some groups that do quite well are monopolists, are people who get a lot of land and control land and start off what we would now call agribusiness, but who find out in California, especially Central Valley California, how to get a lot of land, a lot of workers, a lot of draft animals and do agriculture on an enormous level and a level that drives out any, the class struggles of that situation are quite significant in the 19th century west. Now we’re getting of course to the one that everyone has already jumped ahead of us and gotten to which is what in heaven’s name happens to Indian people with the pursuit of white people’s opportunity.

We know that there’s very complex outcomes. We know that some Indian people, there’s a good share of intermarriage going on. There’s all sorts of things happening that trades and different sorts. Some Indian leaders figure out how to deal with white leaders and how to get concessions and so on. So there’s subtleties, there’s nuances and subtleties and variations. And, there’s no fudging the fact that on the macro level, on the whole big picture level, this is a disaster. This is a disaster of invasion and conquest. And actually back at Harvard, I probably got you, I used to go around and chat with people and just say, is the word conquest inherently negative? And because we had so many people studying so many parts of the planet and also thinking differently about American history, the answer was usually, it’s not inherently negative. It happened all over the planet. Sometimes the conquerors behave with more generosity and recognition of the rights of the conquered. Sometimes they don’t. So I would always say that there is a lot of variation in how the conquerors come in. And some of them are just

astoundingly naive and unaware of the consequences of their actions, which is very common among human beings to have that. So, okay, so there’s no unoccupied part of North America. There’s no, right here is Virgin land. It’s a puzzle because Euro-Americans entering Western places, they knew there was a prior presence there because they saw the people.

There on the Overland Trail. They saw Indian people. So that was quite an act of the imagination to come up with this term “virgin land” and “vacant space” and “unoccupied space”, because all of those all of those places were occupied sometimes with more nomadic than sedentary populations, but enormous. Injustice, I was going to get a mild, I don’t know why we get a more mild mannered word, enormous injustice to the people here and some extremely alarming manipulations and frauds and just general bad behavior on the people making that transaction. I should say one thing that’s been incredibly interesting in the last few years is learning how complex the attitudes of army officers turned out to be. Who knew? Catherine Franklin has a book that will be out fairly soon, that shows the great ethical complexity of army officers. Not all of them, not all of them, but people who actually said, I have terrible orders. I have to drive Indian people back to reservations where the Indian agents will starve them. Indian agents were notoriously corrupt. So there’s army officers saying, I have to do this. And one general actually said it, in the last half of 19th century, 1870s, I think he said, this is a crime against humanity.

So, okay, so we want to, as you’ll notice, I’m pushing hard on what I think I can really back up, that the Euro-Americans came with an enormously wide range of attitudes. Did that make a difference in a more gracious outcome? No, maybe not, probably not. But their minds were just, their minds were a lot more than we gave them credit for. I would say the people who, the historians who were a little bit more dominant before I got into action, they did a disservice by accenting, did a disservice to the people of history by accenting the sense of here comes some people and they’re going to take over and they have a sense of having God on their side and so on. That does not convey who these people were.

Gil Troy (18:06)

But that’s actually why Manifest Destiny is such a useful teaching tool, right? Because even if it wasn’t broadly used, it certainly helps explain a conception and certainly a story that people were telling. And that you and other historians have done such a good job adding, I love those words you use like nuance and subtlety, which are so out of fashion these days. And we grew up addicted to them. That was the power of academia and the power of history to kind of sit with complexity and sit with nuance and sit with truth and in all its messiness.

Patty Limerick (18:38)

We do a major service to the people of the past when we say, well, they’re not who we thought they were. A few of them, yes, but they were not in a situation to have an abstract, glorified, romanticized view of where they were and what they were doing. That was just not, that was not in the picture for them. There’s too much, okay, you wanna, I’m gonna go onto a very unpleasant angle here, but I’ll just say that diarrhea was the disease of the California Gold Rush. Well, when you think about the conditions under which people were living. So how romantic is that gonna be? How much is that gonna be? And, when a good share of those people went back to the East Coast, they formed societies of gold rush participants and they got together and they had banquets and they were nostalgic, which that is one of the greatest powers of the human mind. And it certainly intersects with presidential regimes. Nostalgia can just take down anything in its path. Even when you had a terribly draining, perilous trip across the continent, you’ve arrived and didn’t get your fortune, you were ill, people had to help you in your illness, you had to scrape together the money to go back, then you’ll still go back to the East Coast and go to banquets where you celebrate those great times. Well, you could be enraged by that. If someone wanted to be enraged, you could say that is so in denial of truth and reality, but it’s also kind of an enchanting aspect of human character.

Gil Troy (20:19)

Right, there’s certain power to it in that denialism. So let’s shift to the presidency because so far you’ve been telling a very nuanced and textured story, another word that’s often unpopular these days, about what’s going on in the field, in the ground. Where do the presidents, let’s say in the 19th century, come into this? Is this something that’s kind of just happening outside the presidency and we have a tendency because we’ve now reduced all so much of American history to a series of superheroes or supervillains from presidency to presidency? Or is the president in the 19th century when we read a document about the potential acquisition of Florida in 1821, is that relevant or not?

Patty Limerick (21:00)

It’s extremely relevant, which is really different from saying that there were presidents who had the most realistic and clear vision of the future, because who has that? A clear vision of the future. One of my proteges, an American Indian scholar, and I have become devoted advocates of the term the “unforeseeable future”, because I myself have never once succeeded in foreseeing the future. So everybody, every president stood on the threshold of an unforeseeable future. And they all played in some way or another their stance towards land, their own feelings about land, their own involvement in land speculation in the early years, the Jeffersonian visions of agrarian citizens, able to support themselves and govern themselves because they had that basis and land. Anyway, all of those folks had something in their minds. If the president hadn’t said that there was news of gold in California? Different scale of gold rush, dramatically different scale of gold rush. So the great issue for every president is when will the nation get too big and when will it have overextended? Some of them really put time and trouble into thinking about that. And plenty of citizens think about that as well. What, how big can a democratic republic be before it’s not gonna work? It’s too big, it’s too spread out. It has too many people, too many citizens. So expansion is never a complete hooray for this thing because it’s too clear that it comes with unforeseeable complexities of just how well can a nation cohere when it spreads from coast to coast.

Gil Troy (23:00)

We forget how small and how intimate the New Republic was. 13 colonies spread out along the Atlantic coast. I love to remember how they would talk about when you were 200 nautical miles away from the coast, you could smell the evergreens and the pines, because that’s how lush that area was. And then inevitably that push westward. But one of the things you’re talking about is the president is national megaphone as kind of almost publicity agent for this,

this national mission. One of the things when we read the letter in the Shapell Manuscript from 1821 of James Monroe, we see that he’s talking about Mr. Adams being John Quincy Adams, the future president, regularly pushing support for Florida. And it’s a political issue, right? So it’s an ideological issue. It’s a personal issue, but also there’s a politics to the land expansion as well, and a cost.

Patty Limerick (23:55)

Exactly. And if you are sitting in a decision-making position, you really must be aware of that. I know that John Quincy Adams went through different moods on this. I’ve read a wonderful scholar at UC Davis, Rachel St. John has been careful in tracking that, that he really did think different things at different times. And how could he not? Because the question of what does it mean for the United States to claim land comes with so many challenges of implementation. There’s no meaning in a national claim to land in North America until there’s a real recognition of the issues of military power. There’s obviously a lot of ambivalence in the 19th century. How big should the army be? The army is always getting a little bit bigger and then getting shrunk down again. Are we supposed to be a nation that has a large standing army? Well, probably not, we shouldn’t do that. But if we don’t do that, then how do we make that claim to other people’s territory? How do we make that claim to the native occupied land if we don’t have a significant military? Then we have ethical issues cascading at us. Where, what could possibly be the relationship between the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the treatment of Native people. So I think there’s something that is just a very powerful, let’s do it, that is almost instantly followed. Sometimes the presidential mind never even spends more than a few minutes and then let’s do it without having to say, okay, now how are we gonna do it? I don’t wanna know when the word implementation became common. It’s a very dreary word, but it is the key word for now you have a vision of land acquisition how in heaven’s name are you going to implement that? And how are you going to avoid everything from a

creation of a very burdensome, very detailed bureaucracy to move that land from public domain into private ownership, the word disposal usually used for that, to turn the public domain into private property. That is really gonna take a lot of clerks sitting with paper, filling out forms. It’s gonna be, it’s a little bit humorous to be saying this at this particular time in American history, but, the notion that bureaucracy is going to have to accompany it and will proliferate and grow through that, that’s not anyone’s inspirational visionary speech about land acquisition to say by necessity this will mean the federal government will have more agencies in the executive branch and there will be more clerks filling out forms.

Gil Troy (26:51)

But these are some of the central tensions. We tend to just focus on the good and the bad and the high ideals versus sometimes the brutal outcomes. But I think you’re absolutely right. We’re really getting to the question of not just what is the American character, but what’s the nature of American government? A government that was conceived in rebellion against executive power and against a powerful army is now in order to achieve some of its other goals, now expanding, expanding not just bureaucratically as you’re pointing out, but also in terms of the army, in terms of its domain. And that’s one of the central tensions but also one of the central engines of American growth. I think the presidency is a definite part of that story.

Patty Limerick (27:26)

That’s just perfectly put because the dream is so powerful and rhetorically the words just volunteer to make that seem great. But in fact, you can say as some scholars have said very forcefully, that we make a mistake when we present, as I often did in American history survey classes, the chronology of the growth of the federal government. We would always say in my American history classes and in the textbooks that the federal government was pretty small, not totally small, but kind of small until the progressive era and all the regulatory agencies came into being and then got much bigger with the New Deal. No. No, that was Western American historians not making, not noticing how much the growth of a bureaucracy was the key, one of the key features of Westward expansion. So various people have written wonderfully, historians about, can we rethink that? When did the federal government get so big? Can we rethink that? Can we look at the Office of Indian Affairs? Can we look at the Department of War? Can we look at the General Land Office? I mean, it’s just the post office and the extension of the post office. All of these ways in which it is not, you’re not doing the most factual statement if you say the federal government remains small until the progressive era and the New Deal. You really have to say, that thing was really getting big in the 19th century because how could it not? The administration of the transcontinental railroad funding, the corruption, when there’s a river of money flowing through the Department of the Interior. 1849, why was the Department of the Interior created 1849? Because the United States, this gets back to your great point here, the United States was supposed to be the nation that rebelled against empire and centralized power. And then within, I’m going to say a few hours after the successful revolution, the United States had to say, we have a contiguous land empire of our own. So we’ve just completed a rebellion against the empire. And now we have to start creating the agencies, to do what we just rebelled against; the administration, centralized administration of an empire. So paradox is too weak a term for that. But I’m not sure that I think contradiction is too simple a word, but it is absolutely the case that the acquisition of land and the drive of individual citizens to acquire land required an almost instant contradiction of the premises of the revolution.

Gil Troy (30:21)

And one of the critical turning points of this is what they call the second American Revolution, the Civil War. First of all, it goes back to your earlier point that by acquiring more land after the Mexican territories, all of sudden, what do you do? Do they become slave states or free states? And we see how that just raises more and more tension. But after the Civil War, you have a much expanded army, you a much expanded bureaucracy. Having taught at McGill University in Canada for many years, the one liner about one of the reasons that helped Canada form and become a united confederation was because they were afraid of now an America which had a united and powerful army. Because once you have an army, where do you go? And so we see how the West is this engine, not just for expansion, but just also for government growth and for general growth and for kind of a new identity, right? A new understanding of what it is to be an American. A new understanding of what it is to have this American government and a new understanding what it is have this kind of republic.

Patty Limerick (31:20)

Well, going back to humor, probably the best stance to take to the myth is to chuckle over the notion that the American West, which really did the acquisition of land of the American West, did accelerate the expansion of federal power, staffing, designation of agencies, and so on. With that fundamental aspect of Westward expansion, the Western myth comes up with all the stuff about individualism. That’s, okay, that’s pretty interesting that we would have this and wildness and lawlessness and so on. When the first thing that any mining community wants to do is settle how to make land claims and how to hold on to the mining land claims. It’s not, we would like to stay wild and disordered. It’s we want to get this put together here in a system that will protect our property. So anyway, boy, that silly myth, silly myth, where’d that come from? One place where it came from is that you can have the federal government expanding and aiding the process of expansion in lots of different ways. And it’s still hard to start a homestead. It still takes a lot of individual determination. It wears people down. It takes their tiny savings and puts it into, now we have to have a water well dug? How much will that cost? I mean we to have a cabin? How are we gonna have a cabin? So to say, I think I might’ve spoken sometimes not with enough care in the past of making it seem like, oh individualism, what’s that got to do with the West? But a lot of people took on really trying challenges and persevered and prevailed. So there are some extraordinary stories of people of courage and determination and pluck and character qualities that societies need. 

Gil Troy (33:22)

Yeah, no, and look, we as historians, like presidents, like politicians, ultimately have to tell some kind of story that’s somewhat coherent. And so you sit with the complexity, but you also have to have some kind of plot line. So it’s interesting when we think about the 19th century in many ways, the emphasis is first on Jefferson and agrarianism, and then on the West and land. And then boom, the frontier closes as if somebody comes and locks the door. But what that means is then two things. One is on one hand, the frontier then becomes a kind of different kind of myth. The myth of the frontier both in urban areas, the politically progressive, and then ultimately we’ll get to spaces, what they call the final frontier, although today we talk about the digital revolution, but also, for example, that wonderful document that we shared from the Shapell Manuscript Collection of E.A. Hitchcock, the Secretary of the Interior under Teddy Roosevelt. It’s such a fascinating transition period.

Right, because he represents the cowboy. He’s the New Yorker, Harvard boy, rooted in also the cowboy myth. But as president of the Square Deal, he’s conserving land because he also understands the power of having some kind of what we would now call environmental sensibility that’s an acronymistic term so we can understand things. But he’s also trying to say, wait a minute, we can also empower. And in this letter, after 1902, what we see is Hitchcock talking about the Reclamation Act. And he says, the Reclamation Act, throughout the arid section of the country will give millions of American home builders, each of whom will contribute materially to the prosperity and wellbeing of the nation, such honest administration. And this will be the duty of the Department of Interior. So many of the themes you’ve been talking about play out just in these four or five lines about the empowerment and the preservation and the love of the land, even while it comes with complexity.

Patty Limerick (35:13)

Boy, there is a lot to reflect on in that passage. The word home was so central to the Rooseveltian conservation things. Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the Forest Service, once it got all consolidated, just over and over again, everything Gifford Pinchot writes is about having, supporting the creation of homes and the location of Americans in homes. And so the home building that is in that Hitchcock quotation, home, that I think, I mean, I’m liking this whole approach because it says when we want a frontier reopened to the degree that we can oversimplify progressive motivation and say, boy, are we in a mess now. We have the director of the census and Frederick Jackson Turner have told us that we have lost our frontier that created American character and drove us. I mean, that’s obviously nostalgia speaking. That’s another episode of nostalgia really exercising a lot of power, but there was a reason to think, oh, this is a transition. So the reclamation act turns out to be one of the most striking ways of saying, can we get an extension on this? We, so, well, anyone who has spent time in the company of, our students love nothing more than an extension. Our students are so happy when they get an extension. So, and they are reenacting American history when they’re doing that because for the progressive era to say, we can get an extension. We’re going to have to increase the role of the federal government because that’s going to be too hard. If we want the arid west, arid and semi arid west to be supportive of farmers who the Jeffersonian idea is still lingering there that they will be the bedrock of democracy because they can support themselves and they can’t be tyrannized the way that wage workers might be able to be pushed around. So we have to extend the amount of arable land, farmable land. And the way to do that, no individual can do that on his or her own. They have to have the federal government building big dams, storing the water, distributing the water. They have a dream, which doesn’t work out any more than most other dreams, that the grateful settlers will become prosperous and they will pay off the costs of those dams. Well, that turns out not to be so great. One of the best documents that ever came out of the federal government is the Commissioner of Reclamation, Officer of Reclamation, Frederick Newell’s, his report on, I think it’s like the 10th or 11th year. So we have the reclamation. Now that confuses people when you say that building dams was part of conservation, because people will rightly think, no, that’s not right. Conservation is about, keeping forests thriving, it’s about holding on to what we have and not continuing to industrialize and so on. Well, that can make it very hard to say, but then what is reclamation doing with the building of dams? How does that fit this? So, okay, the upshot of that is that it’s really clear once you pause and think about that, conservation is totally served by building dams and holding water in reservoirs because you are conserving the water, because you’re keeping it from running downstream and wasting itself in the ocean. So that’s why this is actually not as mystifying as it can sometimes seem to have this building of dams as part of Rooseveltian conservation. Well, it certainly is, because it is conserving a resource that would otherwise be wasted.

And Roosevelt and his people are full of statements that this is not about shutting down development. This is in no way that. But it’s in many ways still that nostalgia at work. We’re going to keep what we nostalgically think was a triumphant aspect of American life and American history. We’re going to keep that going. And we’re going to have to follow in that pattern of adding to federal power. And the president in this case is just the most excellent embodiment of that, I’m going say it again, paradox, that we will have a constantly expanding federal government in order to have a constantly expanding set of opportunities in the West that will keep the nation thriving as the nostalgia tells us it was thriving in the 19th century. So I’m not sure that worked out very well as a sentence, but it’s the paradox of we will exert more federal power in order to give individuals more individual opportunity.

Gil Troy (39:44)

That flow line is perfect and it actually anticipates Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal and his famous “for freedom” speech, where it’s not just freedom of religion and freedom of thought, but also freedom from want. What does freedom from want mean? It means that he’s in some ways creating a new frontier. And that’s the perfect anticipation to John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech in 1960, where he says, the new frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. “Beyond that frontier, are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” And so all of a sudden we’ve gone from a frontier which is very hands-on, very much about going out the West and sifting stones to get your gold and suffering all too often, to the panoply of challenges for the 20th and today the 21st century. And that also is, in some ways, the question is whether we can tap into the positive nature of the pioneering spirit, the excitement of Manifest Destiny to somehow make not just America better, but the world better. And that’s John F. Kennedy at his most poetic.

Patty Limerick (40:56)

Yeah, that’s an excellent pulling it all together there because of course a Western American historian, which would be me in this case, does a fair amount of flinching in those sections. So just thinking, wait, the enemies that threaten us from outside and inside. Oh no, this is where you’re not thinking through President Kennedy, you are not, or soon to be President Kennedy, candidate Kennedy, you’re not thinking through what this is going to mean for, or at least say something about the fact that this frontier will do a better job of recognizing and treating with respect the people who have a different story and a different place of origin. Well, no, that does not happen in that piece. And yet he has every reason to invoke that nostalgia and to play that card, I guess we’d say that, in order to say, we will not surrender hope. 

Would it have been helpful if he were able to know that there was going to be a major set of decisions made in favor of Indian people by the Supreme Court, that that was on the horizon? If he had thought about that, would he have done it a different job on that? Well, anyway, it’s just this is neither here nor there because the fact is that he knew what he knew and he put that together in a very powerful way. He went with a version of history that was 47 % based in reality. And why I said 47%, I have no idea. But…

Gil Troy (42:35)

But ultimately, isn’t that our challenge as historians? And isn’t that why we spend so much time collecting documents and doing research and understanding? On the one hand, I think we do want to correct, right? We want to correct our politicians. We want to correct our presidents. We want to correct our students and say, things are more complicated. There are other people. The amazing thing that you’ve done throughout your career is look at those who’ve been overlooked. Look at the stories that haven’t been told. Bring that in. But at the same time, I think one of the things we see in 1960 is how he doubles down in that 47 % helps bring out the best of America and helps bring out an idealism in America and helps bring out an ability to change. I mean I always say these days I’m confused when if we can’t acknowledge any progress, then how can we progress? Right? And that’s a tension. And the danger when we look only backwards and we get too nostalgic is we don’t challenge ourselves and we’re too complacent. But if we don’t enjoy that 47%, then we won’t stretch and grow because we just get to despair.

Patty Limerick (43:35)

I’m liking this a lot because, okay, so I’m gonna bring water issues together with this, because I spent a lot of time with water managers. I spent a lot of time with people who work in the legacy of the Reclamation Act and so on. And so that means I am in the company of people who do water treatment, water quality treatment. So I’m with people who take water sources that have become polluted and they don’t just say, this is hopeless, we’re walking away. They figure out ways to treat the water and remove the pollutants and remove the contamination and often make it potable water again. So that’s why am I bringing this up? Because that’s what I think historians could be doing a lot of. We could be doing something very similar to what the water treatment people do. We could notice that the stream of history has a lot of variation in it. It has some wonderful parts. It has some very damaging, very disturbing parts. So if the water treatment people can do this, if they can go into a situation where there is a very mixed resource and it has great value and it has some very serious problems. The water treatment people who I’ve come to love, you can tell that in my pitch here, that they just say, we can work with that. We can deal with that. That does not mean we’re not going to deny the problems with this. We’re definitely going to face up to that. And we’re going to work on identifying those. The term they use actually is characterizing. Characterizing the water sample, then figuring out how we can treat it so that we do not lose its value. We do not have to just dump it. We do not have to just bury it in the earth. We can make this useful. So I hope that’s something that, this is what I keep thinking, that historians hanging out with water treatment people would be benefited, because you could say, we can do that. We can say that Kennedy wanted a nation to live with hope, to have visions. He uses the word dignity, the human dignity several times in that. He can use a not 100% by a long shot accurate version of history to say, can we make the future better? So the custom among kind of our profession, but also people visiting our profession and taking material from it is to say, well now, it’s all tainted. Now we have found these really quite intolerable flaws. And so that’ll do it for the harvesting the hope, setting the example of persistence, of determination, of refusal to be anything but problem solving. If you have created problems, well then there’s plenty of stories in Western American history where people create massive problems and then they don’t walk away from that, but they try to figure out what to do that will reduce those problems and prevent more of them in the future. So this is quite an applied history moment of we can do this. We can do that kind of our treasured old pal there, Bernard Bailyn, always put in that phrase. If you’re doing a historical project, so what? So we’re gonna learn about presidents and land. So what, but then now what? How do we go forward with that is the really great opportunity that you’re presenting here.

Gil Troy (47:00)

I think you gave us the so what of today with that amazing phrase, the harvesting of hope. And I think our presidents at our best have done that because democracies are fueled by hope. And I feel in many ways that our generation was generation hope because we looked back and our lives are better than our parents’ lives and our grandparents’ lives. And we knew that tomorrow would be better than today. But we also knew that that meant that we had to roll up our sleeves and make it happen. And I think that’s the power of the story of the West at its best. And I think, by the way, that’s one of your great contributions to the story of the West.

Because when I read your work and I learned from you so many years ago and then had the privilege of teaching you again and again, I didn’t end up in despair. I ended up in hope. I ended up with a sense of, there are complexities and the story is more complicated and it’s not Hollywood, thank goodness. But when we see our failures, we also see the challenges we need to overcome and the challenges we sometimes have overcome and the work that is left for us. And hope doesn’t mean complacency and hope doesn’t mean perfection. And hope doesn’t mean defensiveness. Hope means this vision is, you’ve also picked up on those words, dignity. And that’s the tension. That’s, think, what’s missing. This is not a critique of left or right. This is a critique of a conversation of despair in America and a conversation of failure in America, which you find on the far left and the far right. And we really have to go back and find presidents, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, most recently from the right, from the left, who were fueled by hope and understood how to peddle hope at their best.

Patty Limerick (48:26)

And I’m so appreciating every time that you, two or three times you’ve mentioned how complacency can be really the worst. The complacency, there’s something that just is lost in human capacity with complacency. And also as you just did, the word defensiveness. That is so tempting to so many people and it is so much self-indulgence that really reduces the person. The person drawn into defensiveness is a person who has voluntarily reduced her or his or their capacity to take on that problem solving and that change and to say, How do we fend off the complacency and the defensiveness and go straight to the hope?

Gil Troy (49:08)

The more we bring back that word, I think the more we’re returning. So on one hand, it seems kind of strange that a conversation about the presidency and Manifest Destiny and the West would end up with a conversation about hope and texture and nuance. But I actually think it’s, I don’t think it’s surprising at all because I think that’s what the American story and the American West was at its best. And that’s really a tribute also to your extraordinary career and all the amazing things you’ve done to help bring the conversation that’s nuanced but not despairing.

Patty Limerick (49:35)

Well, thank you. Thank you. And I want to say that one of the best ways to go to that is to remember that Indian people persevered and made some remarkable innovations in their lives and our lives and also preserved traditions. So one of the best places to go for hope is to see how Indian people have stayed with us.

Gil Troy (49:54)

I want to thank you for this extraordinary conversation, but more also for decades and decades of inspiration and for truly being a fool in the best sort of ways and telling the truth and telling the truth with a smile, but also understanding that we can have a sense of humor and we can have honesty. And that doesn’t mean that we have to spin and bury complexity. And I want to thank all of you for joining us today at the Human Side of History podcast with Professor Gil Troy. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can read the historic documents we discussed today in full at shapell.org, that’s one P and two Ls. Where you’ll also find a rich collection of manuscripts and articles exploring history. Links to the documents are found in the show notes. And a special thanks for our production team at docyourstory for making this series possible. See you next time and a special thank you to our special guest, Patricia Limerick.

Patty Limerick (50:46)

Thank you very much.