What Price For Progress Now?
I have this little purse that once belonged to my grandmother—my mother’s mother. It is smooth, beautifully tooled leather with a short hand strap and a brass clamshell clasp. The inside is lined in the softest moss green suede and there’s an inner pocket sewn in there. In this pocket, there is a small cardboard ticket stub—a souvenir from the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. This ticket has lived in that pocket since it was first tucked there 92 years ago, when my grandmother was a feisty, very independent young woman.
I remember well, the times— several decades after the fact— she would recant the memories made on that journey, always with a smile and a mischievous twinkle in her large gray eyes. She, along with her younger sister and a cousin, took my grandma’s Model-A on a lengthy summer trip that year, venturing to Yellowstone where they camped for several days before making their way east to Chicago. It was two years before she married my grandfather, and eleven years after her first year of teaching at a one-room country school house known as “East Pride School",” east of Gordon, Nebraska.
I have a picture of the three of them posing in various positions of irreverent joviality, all wearing the dropped-waist dresses and cloche hats so popular at the time. In this photo, the little leather purse casually dangles from my grandmother’s left arm, her right draped over her younger sister’s shoulders, as one foot rests on the fender of the faithful car. It’s a captured happy moment—one she never forgets, and passes on to the family that, in that instant doesn’t exist yet.
In 1933, the Chicago World’s Fair, officially named “A Century of Progress International Exposition,” was a celebration of the substantial advancements that had been made in the preceding 100 years—and they were many. From the invention and wide- spread use of automobiles and mechanized farm equipment, to the Industrial Revolution which brought so many cultural and social changes with it, the world was a very different place in 1933 from how it had looked in 1833.
My grandmother was of Dutch descent, her mother having arrived in the New World as a young teen, sometime during the last quarter of the 19th century, moving west with so many other homesteaders. She married and moved to the Gordon area where she and her husband—like many other settlers to the area—had a “treestead” claim, made possible by the Timber Culture Act of 1873, a little more than a decade after Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. This act allowed people to claim 160 acres of land if they planted and maintained a certain number of trees on a portion of the claim.
Free land may have sounded like a sweet deal, but we’ve all heard the stories from our relatives; homesteading was not for the faint of heart. And I know I’m not alone in taking personal pride in being a descendant of these brave, independent and robust settlers.
It can be a comfort to know you come from sturdy stock, such as they were. Such as they had to be.
Of course we know all this was only made possible by the dispossession of Native Americans from the land that had been their habitat for tens of thousands of years. While bathed in the blood of the indigenous peoples of our nation, the homesteading revolution did provide opportunities for a vast number of others—mainly European immigrants seeking the freedom and prosperity of land ownership, as well as thousands of post-Civil War era ex-slaves, frustrated with white supremacist violence and limited opportunities in the South.
Ours is a complicated history—this great mashed up melting pot of a nation.
We here in the Great Plains region are nearly all part of the 93 million descendants of homesteaders not born in this country. The homesteading saga exemplifies government’s power to reshape, not only the landscape, but people’s lives and livelihoods, for both better and worse.
As we bear witness to the reality of a very different attitude toward today’s immigrants, and the policies enacted to “protect U.S. citizens” (90 precent of whom are descendants of earlier immigrants) it behooves us all to take a step back and look at the big picture of who we areas a nation, and what we have always claimed to stand for as a Constitutional Republic.
Remembering that government power can, and has been, weaponized against the most vulnerable among us, no one should advocate for the mistreatment of anyone.
Have we really not learned anything from our past?
As we have come to see so clearly in recent years how yesterday’s heroes can become today’s villains, all of us would be wise to tread carefully, because the table is still turning. The mistreatment we’re willing to allow for one group, simply lays a clearer path to allow for another.
