Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2002
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 223.
Abstract
This contribution to historical geography maps the idea of governmentality in the nineteenth- century United States through the career of Frances Walker, director of the 1870 and 1880 Census, social commentator, and educator. Drawing on Foucault, Hannah explores Walker's life and work, pinpointing the essential but subtle "moments" in the emergence of governmentality.
Walker's work with the national Census was pivotal, Hannah claims, to increasing governmental control of America's people since it was one of the ways to "internally colonize" a territory. Governmentality, in short, is the "logic of social regulation that consistently blends the principles of freedom and regulation." Great Plains scholars may be surprised to find that the border Walker sought to control was in the East, not the west-wardly expanding one. Because the West was populated mainly with "native White stock," it was not threatening like the porous East which admitted millions of "unfit" immigrants. Creating new categories for data, Walker began to count the number of "foreign-born" people in the US, which was then used to bolster theories about the decline in the native-born birth rate and support racist views about immigrants. Anti-immigrant feeling culminated in 1924 when Congress placed statutory quotas on immigration, an act Hannah lays directly at Walker's feet. In an era where "National ID Cards" may become a reality, Hannah's discussion of the Census as an instrument of social control is apt.
Walker lived in a national culture of manhood. Many groups in society, he believed, could and should be regulated-women, immigrants, Native Americans; however, to over-regulate white men with socialistic policies imperiled their being and weakened their "executive faculties." This paternalistic bias against regulating men but easily subjecting other populations to intensive social control still exists.
There are benefits and losses in Hannah's hinging so much of his analysis on the career of one man. He argues persuasively that by doing so he can trace the "logic of governmentality" through the experience of one remarkable individual. Walker, however, may get too much credit and blame for his part in the story. For readers of Great Plains Quarterly, sharper focus on Native American issues (Walker wanted big reservations to keep the blood supply clean) and the pragmatics of governmentality on the Plains would probably be more to their liking.
Comments
Copyright 2002 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln