Today, according to surveys, the last place American and international tourists seek to explore is the Great Plains. Indeed, if tourists have to travel through this region, they seek to fly over it or drive through at night, and regardless of how they manage to move through this space, they are always in a hurry. But this strong dislike and disregard of the region was not always the case.
Unlike contemporary attitudes that seem to dismiss the region, Americans’ sense of regionalism and of the Great Plains in particular was very different in the post–World War I period. Indeed, many people both inside and outside the region saw the concept of regionalism as the answer to the decadence of modernism, the utter devastation of World War I, the economic depression agriculture suffered after the war, the rise of fascism in Europe, and powerful American financial and political centers of the East. Regionalists believed that a return to regionalism offered something urban America lacked, namely, being in touch with its roots.
During this interwar period, the Great Plains region was distinguished in academic writings and conferences and literary writings, as well as in the arts and film. Historian Walter Prescott Webb, who defined the Great Plains as a distinct, environmentally unified region, described it in this way: “The Great Plains environment, as defined in this volume, constitutes a geographic unity whose influences have been so powerful as to put a characteristic mark upon everything that survives within its borders.”2 Indeed, in 1942, two conferences on the Great Plains were held in New York and Nebraska.3 The region was articulated in the popular imagination by authors such as John Steinbeck, artists such as John Steuart Curry, and directors such as John Ford in his powerful interpretation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. This refocusing on American regionalism, together with the spectacular environmental, ecological, and cultural devastation brought on by the combination of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, worked to shape an especially powerful and long‐lasting sense of the American Great Plains.
