mid-twentieth
century have added positive opposition. Critical ideas are apt to
make any critic suspected of being subversive. The Southwest, Texas
especially, is more articulately aware of its land spaces than of any
other feature pertaining to itself. Yet in the realm of government,
the Southwest has not produced a single spacious thinker. So far as the
cultural ancestry of the region goes, the South has been arid of thought
since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the much talked-of mind of John C.
Calhoun being principally casuistic; on another side, derivatives from
the Spanish Inquisition could contribute to thought little more than
tribal medicine men have contributed.

Among historians of the Southwest the general rule has been to be
careful with facts and equally careful in avoiding thought-provoking
interpretations. In the multitudinous studies on Spanish-American
history all padres are "good" and all conquistadores are "intrepid," and
that is about as far as interpretation goes. The one state book of
the Southwest that does not chloroform ideas is Erna Fergusson's _New
Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples_ (Knopf, New York, 1952). Essayical
in form, it treats only of the consequential. It evaluates from the
point of view of good taste, good sense, and an urbane comprehension of
democracy. The subject is provincial, but the historian transcends all
provincialism. Her sympathy does not stifle conclusions unusable in
church or chamber of commerce propaganda. In brief, a cultivated mind
can take pleasure in this interpretation of New Mexico--and that marks
it as a solitary among the histories of neighboring states.

The outstanding historical interpreter of the Southwest is Walter
Prescott Webb, of the University of Texas. _The Great Plains_ utilizes
chronology to explain the presence of man on the plains; it is primarily
a study in cause and effect, of water and drought, of adaptations and
lack of adaptations, of the land's growth into human imagination as well
as economic institutions. Webb uses facts to get at meanings. He fulfils
Emerson's definition of Scholar: "Man Thinking." In _Divided We Stand_
he goes into machinery, the feudalism of corporation-dominated economy,
the economic supremacy of the North over the South and the West. In
_The Great Frontier_ (Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the
Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe--a frontier that brought
about the rise of democracy and capitali