June 14, 2001

Plains Folk: Cleaning up the ‘Too-much Mistake’

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

In our common language we often draw a distinction between the politician and the statesman, or I should say statesperson. A politician curries popular favor and thinks in the short term, we reckon; a statesperson tries to do the right thing and thinks in the long term. Politician bad, statesperson good. As in so many matters, though, things may be different here on the plains.

The thing is, we have developed a peculiar definition of what constitutes a prairie statesperson. The concept originated sometime in the 1960s, about the time historian Elwyn Robinson gave a name to what a lot of people had begun to talk about. He called it the "too-much mistake."

This was the idea that the pioneer generation made a big mistake by building too much and too many of everything. This is a semiarid hinterland, the prophets said; live with it. They said we were in for a long night of boarding up and belt-tightening. Most of us should leave.

What, then, would constitute statesmanship? The orderly dismantlement of civilization on the plains. School administrators, playing the parts of statesmen, said we cannot just let the schools fall down pell-mell; we must plan for orderly consolidation. Bishops, having harvested a crop of clergy from the excess of young people on the plains, shipped them off to fill urban pulpits and planned the closing of their home churches. Most of all, state leaders, in Old Testament rhetoric, charged us all to lower our expectations and competed to see who could dismantle the country more efficiently.

Now I’m going to sound even more bitter–forgive me. Many of these same statespersons quietly pulled their capital from their home states and eventually removed their persons to Florida or Arizona.

A few days ago a professor from one our great land-grant universities remarked that she had talked with many young people who wanted to farm, but their parents had told them to become engineers or anything else but farmers. She wondered why that was. I said, you won’t like the answer. The parents have their whole life’s work wrapped up in the farm, I pointed out, and they want to retire to a condo down south rather than stay around and feed stock in the snow. If the kids want the farm, then the parents cannot extract the capital from it that will make possible the retirement of their dreams.

In cranky moments I say, "God save us from the statespersons of the prairie." In more sober moments I realize, we have met these statespersons, and they are us.

You may wonder what has set me off on this subject. I’ve been reading about Spruce Up South Dakota, a pet project of South Dakota Governor Bill Janklow. (And don’t take this in a partisan way, because I am a life-long Republican, thank you.) This is a state program to "clean up and beautify South Dakota." It targets "abandoned and vacant buildings; junked cars; tires and batteries; white goods (freezers, washers, dryers, stoves, etc.); pesticides (DDT, Chlordane, Endrin, Toxaphene, etc.); and, abandoned underground fuel tanks."

Most of this sounds good. All except that part about the vacant buildings. As plans for Spruce Up South Dakota have firmed up this spring, statespersons have contemplated the demolition of entire villages. Your tax money at work.

Heck, you know, that stuff is hard to mow around. Ruins, my fellow plainspersons, are the signatures of great civilizations. Only insecure colonial peoples are ashamed of them.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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