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A Response to “John Wesley Powell and the Unmaking of the West”

I have been working for a while on a study of the life and times of John Wesley Powell, partly because the biographies by William Culp Darrah and Wallace Stegner are so out of date (both were conceived more than a half century ago) and because neither was adequately researched. Both tend to glorify Powell and excuse his failings, which admittedly were many: too limited a passion for the wild, too much acquiescence in the removal of Indians, too uncritical a faith in science and progress. But Karl Hess Jr., in "John Wesley Powell and the Unmaking of the West" [Environmental History2 (January 1997): 7-28], takes legitimate criticisms and turns them into a rant against government that belongs on talk radio more than in a scholarly journal. He has simply not done his homework on Powell. He confusedly blames all environmental degradation in the West on Powell and his successors, a group of federal resource managers whose main fault is that they have too willingly served private greed. He offers no evidence that the western range has actually gotten worse under government supervision than it was under the laissez-faire regime prior to the 1930s. He holds up a false nostalgic ideal of unregulated capitalism as the golden road to environmental preservation and community ethics. He dishonors the memory of Stegner, whose views of the West were complex and always open to new information. Hess wants to make Powell the founding figure of Progressivism, which he defines as experts ruling over the lives of ordinary people. These Progressives supposedly ruined the West. However one regards the Progressive movement (and I have been critical of its legacy myself), Powell was of a rather different persuasion. His ideal West was not Gifford Pinchot's ideal West, in which western lands would remain in federal hands and federal resource agencies would manage them. That is why the two never saw eye to eye. Powell may have been, on the national level, an evolutionary socialist; that is, he saw large-scale industrial incorporation leading inevitably toward a more centralized state. But out in