Our Best Days Are Behind Us

You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said, but I do, and I do so without discomfort. Although I get a little tired of replaying the buzzer-beater in the state semifinals of 1970, because that was a long time ago and a lot of miles, too, and was not necessarily the apex in the trajectory of local history. Or maybe it was, and everything since then has been downhill. This actually is a thing among Great Plains historians, the assumption of inevitable decline, such that scholars have adopted the term, declensionism , to describe it. Scholars devised the term, but the phenomenon is real, we feel it at the grassroots in prairie communities.

Late in the last century I was the contractor with the South Dakota State Historical Society to script the twentieth-century galleries. One development they asked me to research and interpret was the loss of farms and the exodus of young people from the region. I found there was quite a bit of good social-scientific work on the subject, the findings of which surprised me. The No. 1 reason cited by young people for leaving South Dakota: my parents told me to. Their parents said, you can make a better life somewhere else.

This is Great Plains declensionism incarnate. Here in North Dakota, the historian Elwyn Robinson encoded it into our state history. Robinson perceives six themes as shaping historical influences on North Dakota, and every one of them is negative. His favorite theme, it seems to me, is dependency, and Robinson is famous for coining the phrase, the Too-Much Mistake . We have too many farms, too many towns, too many people, we’re over-extended, tighten your belts, it’s gonna get rough.

The environmental historian William Cronon, in a masterly essay from 1992 (the year I moved to North Dakota), discusses the nature of storytelling on the Great Plains, which as a storyteller I take to heart. He observes that on the prairies we have two master narratives into which we fit ourselves and our communities. The first narrative, the one you find in every published county history, is progress: conquest and transformation of the prairies, establishment of civilization—Look how far we have come! This progressive narrative is grounded in the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, who said in 1893 that the frontier was the defining experience in American life.

The other meta-narrative is the converse of the first: declensionism, a story with negative trajectory. If ever you’ve heard someone talking about the good old days, saying things just aren’t the same anymore, our best days are behind us, all the best people are in the cemetery—you have encountered a declensionist; heck, maybe you are one! Cronon traces the rise of declensionism to the years of depression and dust, the 1930s, and surely that AP reporter who in 1935 coined the phrase, Dust Bowl , has something to answer for.

I think the headwaters of declensionist angst go farther back. Our two greatpoets of a century ago, Clell Gannon and James Foley, both saw this place as diminished once the frontier had passed, and Foley left the state on account of it. Certainly if you consider the long arc of history from the Indigenous point of view, our white-guy constructions of rise and fall seem irrelevant.

I have a presentation to give at a conference soon in Bozeman where I have promised to say something new about the old saw of declensionism. I think I have found my angle in an unexpected place: Edward Gibbon’s multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , published in 1776-88. Perhaps we just have an irresistible attraction to narratives of failure. I’ll let you know how this comes out.

Our Best Days Are Behind Us

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