Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West
Although the thinkers and leaders examined in this volume never constituted a unified movement complete with manifestoes or specific goals, they raised voices of protest against racial, environmental, and working-class injustices during the Depression era that reverberate in the twenty-first century. Sharing a deep affection for their native and adopted places within the West, these individuals felt a strong sense of avoidable and remediable wrong done to the land and the people who lived upon it, motivating them to seek the root causes of social problems and demand change.
Chapter 5, Radical by Nature: Sanora Babb and Ecological Disaster on the High Plains, 1900-40, is by Douglas Wixson. He writes: “Her radical regionalist voice foregrounds and dignifies the ordinary and gives expression to timeless social injustices such as homelessness, poverty, discrimination, inequality, economic hardship, and repression of dissent.”
Published by University of Oklahoma Press, 2013