There has been a current of revisionism in recent works about South Dakota and Great Plains history. Jon Lauck describes a South Dakota culture in almost idyllic terms in his monographs The Lost Region and Prairie Republic, as well as in the series The Plains Political Tradition for which he serves as coeditor. Lauck has resurrected the Turner thesis in his effort to explain what he claims is the culture of independence and success on the prairie. David Mills revises the image of the people of the Great Plains during the Cold War in his book Cold War in a Cold Land. Like Lauck, Mills promotes the idea of a practical people who did not cower in fear during the Cold War, but who sought to profit from it.
Professor Robert E. Wright's new book, Little Business on the Prairie: Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Challenge in South Dakota, is a celebration of entrepreneurship and of revisionism. Wright acknowledges Lauck's influence, writing that he helped convince Wright “of the importance of South Dakota and its entrepreneurial business and political cultures” (p. viii).
Wright seeks to revise not only modern South Dakota history, but also the history of ancient Indian cultures that he claims were proto-entrepreneurial (pp. 18–19). The author's message is clear: “Entrepreneurial enterprise—the system of political economy that encourages innovations large, small, and in between—drives prosperity and even happiness” (p. 4). South Dakota, he asserts, is good for entrepreneurs—it is a “pro-business state”—due to its relative lack of business regulation (p. 4). Wright's characterization of South Dakotans as hard-working, ethical, and libertarian seekers of freedom nicely fits the new revisionist portrait.
He has considered a host of sources in establishing his narrative: his bibliography runs 14 pages. He has examined the standards of South Dakota history (his footnote and bibliographic citations read like a “Who's Who” of South Dakota historians over the years), journals of pioneers, papers of influential business people, and even the KKK collection at the Center for Western Studies. This is not surprising in a book whose second chapter title suggests its breadth: “Economic Activity on the Northern Plains, 10,000 B.C.E. to A.D. 1888.” Professor Wright's research and his effort to incorporate it are praiseworthy.
Of course, there is a problem with celebrations: they do not carry a mandate to engage in constructive criticism. Before I point out what I think are weaknesses in the book, I should note that I approach economic history from a different perspective than Wright. I am a diplomatic historian first, a historian of South Dakota second, and have no formal training in economic history.
Although Wright does recognize an “exploitative” entrepreneur in his triple typology that also includes “innovative” and “replicative” entrepreneurs, he rarely writes about the consequences of their behavior (p. 6). He mentions the word “pollution” only once and it is in reference to light pollution, not Whitewood Creek, the Big Sioux River, or the uranium tailings in Edgemont (p. 15). There is no discussion of what right the feedlot entrepreneur asserts to pollute the air his neighbors and travelers alike must breath. A sense of stewardship must accompany entrepreneurship, and that part of the equation is absent from Wright's analysis.
One of the strengths of Wright's book is that he addresses the situation of Native Americans past and present and the reservation system. Nonetheless, when assessing government policies toward Native Americans, Wright attributes the “immiseration of the nation's Native peoples” to the federal government (p. 212). Although the federal government has certainly perpetrated and perpetuated horrendous Native American policies, Wright does not address the fact that individual entrepreneurs who violated borders in their search for gold and land made it very difficult for the federal government to enforce treaty obligations in South Dakota.
In addition, Wright makes no mention of the contemporary entrepreneurs who sell alcoholic beverages in Whiteclay, NE, a stone's throw away from the historically “dry” Pine Ridge Reservation, and their share in the process of “immiseration.” His solution for Native American immiseration is less government regulation and more entrepreneurship (p. 41.). “Tribal corporations,” he asserts, “have done best when not subjected to political oversight” (p. 214).
Wright occasionally draws sweeping conclusions from single pieces of evidence. An example is when he accepts one New Yorker's observation that in 1990 there was “almost no price gouging” at the Sturgis Rally (p. 2). Conventional wisdom holds that price gouging does occur, so such a generalization demands evidence, not opinion.
More troubling is Wright's selective use of at least two sources. Hapa Girl is May-lee Chai's memoir of an American girl of Chinese descent who spent some difficult years as a teenager in Vermillion, South Dakota. Although her memories are an important part of her identity, there are few if any sources that corroborate them. Six of her nine footnotes are to Peter Matthiesen's problematic In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, yet Wright cites her 14 times and uses her as his source for an alleged William Janklow quote (p. 212). I would not, as Wright does, use Hapa Girl for an epigraph or as an authoritative source.
The other example is Wright's citation of Frank Bloodgood's memoir of life in Huron as evidence that “South Dakota is a less bigoted place than outsiders may assume …” (p. 214). The same people of Huron who were debating whether “Indians received more injustices than the Negro” in the 1880s could read editorials in their paper that used the common racial epithet for Americans of African descent in an effort to diminish their capacity as soldiers during the Spanish-American War (p. 214).
Although any reviewer will find assertions to challenge in any book, Wright's book is worth reading. It will provide advocates of free enterprise much to relish; in equal portions, it will give proponents of state regulated markets ammunition for their policies. Anyone who reads it will, I am certain, be provoked to think further about entrepreneurship in South Dakota and in general, and that is not a bad thing for a history book to do.
