The Promise and Threat of Homes in the Reconstruction-era West

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the “home” arose as one of the most ubiquitous metaphors organizing American society. It acted as a constant moral blueprint, guiding Americans through a series of monumental changes, including the conquest, settlement, and integration of the American West. This paper explores both the promise of and threat to the archetypal white home in the Reconstruction-era West as depicted in popular culture and major political debates. I will examine the late-nineteenth century cultural phenomenon known as “mug books,” mass-produced western county histories that worked to reunite the nation through the promise of white homes in the West. I will also analyze political cartoons and popular literature surrounding the main political controversies of the post-Civil War era: the largely western and racialized “problems” known to contemporaries as the Indian, Chinese, and Mormon questions. These minority groups were all depicted in the national discourse as practicing alternative domesticities that threatened the attainment of white homes. By examining these often overlooked sources, I combine political questions and issues often treated separately, and by focusing on the home, I bring a gender analytic into a conversation about Reconstruction in the West that race has dominated. The tension between the promise and threat of homes in the West ultimately reveals, I argue, how a divided nation worked to erase the bloody history of the Civil War and sectional division through a mythos of western, white home-making that sought to eliminate, exclude, and overpower groups practicing alternative visions of home.