Prairie republic
Subtitle: the political culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889
By: Jon K. Lauck.
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Norman
Language: eng
Number of pages: 281
ISBN-13: 9780806141107
Subjects: Political culture -- Dakota Territory; Republicanism -- Dakota Territory; Land settlement -- Dakota Territory; Christianity -- Dakota Territory; Dakota Territory -- History; Dakota Territory -- Politics and government; Dakota Territory -- Religious life and customs
Description: American democratic ideals, civic republicanism, public morality, and Christianity were the dominant forces at work during South Dakota's formative decade. In our cynical age, such a claim seems either remarkably naïve or hopelessly outdated. Territorial politics in the late-nineteenth-century West is typically viewed as a closed-door game of unprincipled opportunism or is caricatured as a drunken exercise in bombast and rascality. Now Jon K. Lauck examines anew the values we like to think were at work during the founding of our western states. Taking Dakota Territory as a laboratory for examining a formative stage of western politics, Lauck finds that settlers from New England and the Midwest brought democratic practices and republican values to the northern plains and invoked them as guiding principles in the drive for South Dakota statehood. Prairie Republic corrects an overemphasis on class conflict and economic determinism, factors posited decades ago by such historians as Howard R. Lamar. Instead, Lauck finds South Dakota's political founders to be agents of Protestant Christianity and of civic republicanism -- an age-old ideology that entrusted the polity to independent, landowning citizens who placed the common interest above private interest. Focusing on the political culture widely shared among settlers attracted to the Great Dakota Boom of the 1880s, Lauck shows how they embraced civic virtue, broad political participation, and agrarian ideals. Family was central in their lives, as were common-school education, work, and Christian community.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Time, place, method; title: A Machiavellian moment on the middle border; title: God's country; title: "The organic law of a great commonwealth"; title: The intellectual origins of Dakota Territory.