In August of 1889, five Western states ratified their constitutions. They all had something in common. They were unusually progressive and pragmatic for their time. But since then, these states have become some of the most conservative in the country. Sheridan author Samuel Western is a former professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. Now he has a new book out called, “The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Promise of the Great Plains and the Northern Rockies.” Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards chatted with him.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Melodie Edwards: Why was 1889 such an extraordinary year for Western states?
Samuel Western: The wheel was turning for states giving up territory-hood and applying for statehood, and 1889 was sort of the witching hour. These states suddenly decided that they had a window. [They] had struggled before to become states because they didn't have various qualifications: they didn't have enough population or assessed valuation. But suddenly they saw there was this push coming. It was quite successful.
ME: What was kind of surprising about all of these constitutions?
SW: These states would be North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. I think what was surprising was their pragmatism. They were poor. They did not have enough people, and they really put ideology on the back burner. So, they asked, ‘How can we create all the necessary players and foundations for statehood?’ Because of that, they were relatively inclusive.
ME: What did you find in terms of the unifying values? There was still a certain kind of brand of conservatism, but I wonder if you can talk about what that looked like back then?
SW: Oh, that's a great question, Melodie, and it’s really at the heart of the book. That is that most of the men – and they were all men who were the delegates here – were fairly conservative, which is to say they backed the gold standard. They wanted minimal debt, a lot of the features of sort of classic conservative thought. But again, they were very pragmatic. They had this huge task before them. How could they finance the state? What could they have for revenue streams? It was a unique combination of values of safety and security and tradition mixed with a sense of adventure and open mindedness. Until you could start to see the cracks were showing by the 1970s and 80s.
ME: These days, we [Wyoming] sort of get thrown in, as a conservative, very red state, that we are the same as a lot of southern states in our values and in our culture of conservatism. But you seem to take issue with that. You're saying that we come from very different roots.
SW: We do come from very different roots, socially and economically. I think I made the point that the South was connected to Europe through trade: through indigo, through slaves, through cotton, through rum, through rice. We had none of those connections. People came out here, they were generally – especially in Wyoming – they were poor. So a pragmatism and a sense of the commonwealth was quite unique to the 89ers [Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Idaho].
How did Elwood Mead, who was then an engineer at the Agricultural University, it was called – [Colorado State University] now – how did he get his water system written in the Constitution? That was radical! It was really something else to make the concept that water goes with the land, you can't separate the water from the land. That was such an egalitarian concept.
ME: I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how we have veered away from those original values that we are founded upon. What's changed and why?
SW: I think it starts in a place that might strike you as odd. I think it starts at our Permanent Wyoming Trust Fund. We have a sovereign fund worth $10 billion – now over $10 billion – for which the legislature gets $450 million in interest every year. Because we don't have to worry about paying our bills, we worry about other things. We have a moat of money around Wyoming that protects us. We don't have to change, we don't have to accommodate, and it has made us a magnet for people that want to come here and say, ‘Well, we're conservative. We don't want to change.’
There were a number of things that I think happened. The 1980s and what happened both to oil and gas and what happened to agriculture. It introduced a real bitterness. The late 70’s and 80’s really stuck in people's craw and it didn't go away. What it did is it opened up the lens for people who were generally of a libertarian bent. Like abortion, people just didn't talk about that. Banning books, it was just like, ‘No, that's your own business.’ Yet Wyoming and North Dakota, which also has a permanent fund, for a lot of us, the bills got paid. So it was a Petri dish, if you will, for movement conservatism to grow, which is much more inclined to go to social issues.
ME: You mention in the book how you feel that former President [Donald] Trump represents the antithesis of a lot of these Western values. I wonder if you could explore how his leadership is steering us away from our core values?
SW: I think the central one is a pluralistic society in which no person is above the law. Trump is an authoritarian. Love him or hate him, he is an authoritarian person. Authoritarianism is a value and we have never embraced that. That is probably my greatest worry is that we are a relatively pluralistic, inclusive society, and Trump is an authoritarian, exclusive narrative, and I think that is in direct contrast to the values in our constitution.
ME: Are those values still something that can bring us together? That there is a commitment to some of those central values that we did install in our constitution?
SW: I worry about how there is an element of the conservative party in this country that does not favor public education. We, in Wyoming in particular but also North Dakota, we are over the top about public education. I think another central value is public lands. Man, I just think that is so baked into the identity of Wyoming, is public lands and access to them. The third one is, for all these states, (not so much Idaho), is a reverence for agriculture. For Wyoming, it's stock growing, and for the Dakotas, it's row crops, and Montana, it's both. Now, agriculture is changing so fast, and it's leaving so many people behind and I don't know how that's going to play out.
It's just one big experiment. I wrote the book because I hope we don't lose these values that are so central.
