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The big role that ranchers play in politics in the West

Babbitt Ranch
(Photo by Stina Sieg - KJZZ)
A view of the Babbitt Ranch on the Arizona Trail.

Ranchers in Arizona weigh in on some of the biggest issues facing the state — including water, the border and immigration. They’ve also made their opinions known on concerns that may be more specific to their industry — the advent of lab-grown meat and wolf populations across the West, for example.

Michelle Berry has studied the politics and political influence of ranchers, and is an assistant professor in the Departments of History and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Berry also is author of the book "Cow Talk: Work, Ecology and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West."

She grew up in the '80s in western Colorado surrounded by agriculture and says her dad did some cattle ranching, as well. Her research was sparked by an interest in wanting to know more about the people around whom she grew up.

Berry spoke with The Show — starting with if what she found confirmed what she’d thought in her childhood, or if it differed from her experiences.

Michelle Berry
University of Arizona
Michelle Berry

Full conversation

MICHELLE BERRY: Yeah. No, that's a great question. No, it didn't actually. So I'm an environmental historian by training and also a labor historian. So I'm kind of interested in work and the ways in which the more than human informs human cultures and human work escapes if you will. And so obviously, cattle ranching is a really good setting for that kind of work.

And I remember from my younger years just thinking about the ways in which cattle ranchers were not really antithetical to quote unquote environmentalism. They cared quite a bit about the range and maybe they weren't, didn't love every species of wildlife, wolves, coyotes, et cetera, but they did have an environmental sensibility that I think sometimes was mischaracterized by environmentalists and by those who were not cattle ranchers.

And so I found in my research that, in fact, ranchers really were even in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s very focused on trying to do the right thing by the range and because they wanted to do the right thing by their cows.

I also was really interested in powerful female ranchers that I had contact with as a younger person. My mom was a Cowbelle. And so that women's auxiliary of these cow growers associations were, was really, really powerful and really active in these years. So that was really fun to investigate all of, all of that too.

MARK BRODIE: Did you find that in some ways women on the inches had maybe more power, more rights, more authority than they did in, in other segments of life in America at that time?

BERRY: I think you know, white, and of course, most of my book is about Anglo cattle ranchers. I didn't do anything with reservation ranchers. And so this is really mostly about Anglo cattle ranchers. And so if we think about cattle ranchers as maybe quote unquote, middle class, right? They were, they were rural class, but they are also kind of, you know, rich in land, et cetera.

And if we think about middle class white women in the 1950s and ‘60s in the United States, their world, although the, they're doing a lot more than we often think of them as doing, as doing. They, they, their worlds were a bit circumscribed by gendered ideals. You know, at home having, you know, maybe living in the suburbs, having multiple children, vacuuming the living room in high heel shoes, that sort of thing. And these ranch women are doing not that.

So they are doing tremendous domestic labor. They, they do a lot of laundry, they do the cooking, but they're also very much laboring in the ranch environments. And they are really proud of their identity as ranchers and as partners in the ranch business. And so I think that sets them apart. There's a kind of feminism there that is really interesting.

And then they do this tremendous labor of sort of getting together and creating community and making sure that there's almost a PR kind of kind of labor that they do for the cattle ranching business itself.

BRODIE: Well, so you mentioned that you wanted to look at what brought ranchers together during this time period. What was it, what did bring them together?

BERRY: Cows. It sounds so just silly, simple.

BRODIE: Makes sense.

BERRY: But really, it does make sense. And that's kind of the title of the book is that their ability to talk about cows, to privilege their cattle, to privilege the process of growing cows was really what gave them cause to come together to talk about things.

And in addition to that, there's this tremendous change that's happening in the U.S. Mountain West during these decades, right? It's the post-war, we're seeing an increase in metropolitan areas. Phoenix probably being the best example of that. And ranchers sensed that change, not only did they have a new federal government present in grazing regulations. They also are starting to sense that there's this incursion of recreationists, of hunters that don't know what the heck is going on. There's increasing highway construction.

So there's a lot of things that are happening to ranchers that inspire them to come together and try to figure out how to handle those changes and how to talk to one another about those changes and advocate for their quote unquote way of life.

BRODIE: How did ranchers go about trying to gain this, I guess, let's call it political power in terms of making sure that policies that affected them were what they wanted and maybe even getting you know, fellow ranchers elected to policy making positions?

BERRY: So they, they create their livestock associations in the late 19th century, mostly to handle what they called rustling, right? Which was the stealing of their cattle quote unquote from the open range, right. Of course, we know that it wasn't open and we know that it was Native land and, and all of those things, but they believed their cows to be their private property and that folks who were taking those cattle were stealing. And so rustling was the primary cause for the creation of the livestock associations.

And then those membership in those associations declines a bit in the ‘20s and especially the ‘30s with the Great Depression. But if they come back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, so they increase the numbers of members in these associations in every state in the book and then within those organizations. And this is still true today, they have a variety of committees. So ranchers serve on a variety of committees that have a different, all different kinds of topics. And then the folks who are on those committees reach out to their elected officials.

Oftentimes, they would labor to get ranchers elected to public office, especially the state legislatures. They petition the federal government agencies quite a bit, especially the USDA, the Forest Service, et cetera. And so their political activism comes through their associations and then it takes a variety of forms.

BRODIE: Do ranchers tend to have maybe, did they then and do they now, are they pretty much in agreement on particular issues or is there a wide range of opinions on what policies might be best?

BERRY: Oh, yeah, that's a, that's a great question and I think it's, I think they're just like any other cultural group that comes together for reasons about power. They have lots of disagreements and part of it is talking through those disagreements and trying to ascertain compromise and to figure out what the best path forward is.

One of those examples is the role of state government and even federal government in things like quarantine or required vaccination programs for diseases in the ‘50s and ‘60s. So they don't, they don't all agree, but they also recognize that they have a lot in common and it's in their best interest to try to speak with a common language with a kind of commonality that, that I think a lot of cultural groups do when they try to politically organize.

BRODIE: I'm curious when you look at the political influence of ranchers in the ranching community now, how would you describe it?

BERRY: Well, it's so interesting. Brian Calver who writes for the High Country News calls it the political power of the cowboy. And I think if we look at kind of numbers right, there were so many range cattle ranchers in the ‘40s and ‘50s. So their political power kind of numerically made some sense, geographically made some sense, their numbers are decreasing as we know, as we move into the, through the 21st century and yet they still have this, this power to speak and this power to advocate for public policy that may be incommensurate with their actual numbers.

But I still think they're incredibly powerful and they're powerful in the imagination of the Mountain West, that political power of the cowboy, meaning the iconography, the values that ranch culture seem to promote, you know, and I think that still has had a staying power so that when ranchers do speak, when they do lobby, when they do advocate for their, for their needs, they have to still have tremendous power, I think.

Although I think they're starting to, to lose some of that power and certainly they thought they were losing that power even as early as the 1950s, they were already fearing erasure from the landscape of the Mountain West, which is fascinating if, if those folks could see what's happening now, they'd, they'd be really surprised, I think.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Mark Brodie is a co-host of The Show, KJZZ’s locally produced news magazine. Since starting at KJZZ in 2002, Brodie has been a host, reporter and producer, including several years covering the Arizona Legislature, based at the Capitol.
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