Pioneer Myths, Imported Politicos. Public land sales, part 2. The historo-religious motivation for some (but certainly not all) of the backers.
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Lex Anteinternet: Pioneer Day. Pie & Beer Day. Public land sales, ...: Flag of the putative State of Deseret. Church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact - religion and politics should not be...
In that, we noted this:
One of the Salt Lake newspapers has started a series on this, noting basically what I just did (I actually started this tread prior to the paper). This doesn't cover it all, however. It'd explain none of what we see in Wyoming backers like Harriet Hageman. We'll look at that next.
Now we're taking that look. More specifically, we're looking at the question of how Harriet Hageman, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis can look at the people who voted them in, and say, basically, "screw you and the horse you rode in on".
We'll note first that we don't think the answer is the same for all three of them.
Let's start with Hageman.
Hageman, unlike Mike Lee, is not a Mormon. For that matter, neither are Barrasso or Lummis (although we'll note that Barrasso's religious history should inform our views on him. Indeed, it's difficult to learn much about Hageman's religious background at all. Sometimes she's listed as a "Protestant", which she no doubt is, but that doesn't mean much in this context, as that category includes such things as Anglo Catholics and Missouri Synod Lutherans, to liberal Episcopalians. It also includes the vast numbers of various small Protestant churches that often ignore vast tracts of American Christianity while being either very conservative or very liberal on things they pay attention to. Hageman never really says what her Protestantism is allied to, or where she attends church, or if she even does. One biography says she's a "non denominational" Christian, which fits in well with the far right she's part of. A slight clue of her views is that she's married to a Cheyenne lawyer who is much older than she is with nearly twenty years on her age and who had a prior marriage. They have no children. Those last two items pretty much take her out of the Apostolic Christianity category, and out of those Protestant churches that are close to Apostolic Christianity.
If Hageman has no children, what she has is the weak tea of a career, the thing feminist sold on women as the fulfillment of their testimony and which, just as with men, turned out to be a fraud foisted upon them, and which continues to be each year at high school graduation. I'm not saying having a career is bad, but the focus on it as life defining is pretty much living a lie.
What Hageman also has is a history.
Harriet Maxine Hageman was born on a ranch outside of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in the Wyobraska region of Wyoming, a farming dominated portion of the state that lacks public lands and which is unique in many ways. Her father was James Hageman, who served as a longtime Republican member of the Wyoming House of Representatives until his death in 2006. She is a fourth generation Wyomingite, descending from James Clay Shaw, who moved to Wyoming Territory from Texas in 1878. Harriet is one of six siblings. Her brothers are Jim Hageman, Dewey Hageman, and Hugh Hageman, Her sisters are Rachel Hageman Rubino and Julie Hageman. Rachel Rubio passed away in 2024, shortly after Harriet was elected to Congress. One of her kids is a lawyer. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was read at her funeral.1
When Harriet ran for Governor, all three of her brothers, but not her sisters, were included in a video talking about how much she loved people, and how family was central to her. Maybe all that is true, but here's where the story, from our prospective, gets a bit interesting.
Hageman went to Casper College on an ag scholarship. Indeed, she was at CC at the same time I was. From there, like me, she went on to US, and ultimately on to law school.
She didn't go on to the ranch, or a career in agriculture.
I guess I didn't either, but my story is the story of early death, which intervenes with our desires and which determines our path in life more than we care to admit. I don't know what Harriet's story is, but I would note that as a rule, from her generation, daughters of ranchers weren't going back to the family ranch after high school graduation. It wasn't that they would not, it was that they could not. Those that retained a role in agriculture did so through the result of marriage, often knowing men who were farmers and ranchers. Indeed, off hand, the few daughters of farmers or ranchers I know who ended up in agriculture ended up in it in just that fashion.
Hugh Hageman ended up in ranching. Dewey Hageman seems to has well. Jim Hageman seems to have as well, or at least he's still in the Ft. Laramie area. In the video, all three really look like ranchers.
When I was growing up, as noted, women didn't end up in ranching except through marriage. Usually no effort was made whatsoever to try to incorporate them into a ranching future. Quite a few times, quite frankly, they were expected to marry into a ranching family, but even by the 1980s things had turned to where that was no longer the case, and many started to move into other careers. Law has always been a really popular career for ranchers and farmers to send their children into, as basically farmers and ranchers don't believe that lawyers work. Indeed, for the most part, they don't believe people in town actually work either.
Jim Hageman, the father of the family, himself came from a large ranching family in Converse County. In the near hagiographies written about his daughter, it's noted how he built the ranch from nothing, but frankly, that's just not true. He was born in an era in which the younger sons of ranchers could still secure ranch land, with help through loans and loan programs. Now that's impossible.
But that puts Harriet straight into the Wyoming agricultural family myth.
I love ranching, as anyone here can tell. But I'm a realist, and perhaps a cynic. My own family has been in the region since at least 1879. Hageman's, apparently, since 1873. People who came out here didn't do so because, usually, they were wealthy, although some did, which is another story. Rest assured the progenitor of the Hageman family in Wyoming, a Clay, wasn't.
What they were, however, were beneficiaries of one of the largest social welfare programs in American history, maybe the largest. In 1873 the genocidal aspect of that program was still well under way. Basically, the US used the Army to remove, at gunpoint, the native inhabitants and corral them into largescale concentration camps and then gave the land away to those willing to engage in agriculture. Most of those who took up the opportunity were dirt poor. The program was kept up and running until 1932, at which time the Taylor Grazing Act was thankfully passed and the land preserved.
Homesteading was very hard and difficult work and the majority of homesteads failed. But still, it wasn't as if homesteaders came into "virgin" lands and tamed it with their own two bare hands. The government removed or killed the original inhabitants. In many areas, the government built large-scale irrigation projects for the new ones, at government expensive. Homesteaders were admirable in many ways, but they weren't without assistance.
James Hageman was born in 1930, which means when he was first starting his ranching life, land was still affordable, something that ceased to be the case in the 1980s but which would still have somewhat been the case when Harriet's brothers were entering their adult lives. Most men from ranch families tried to stay in ranching, if they could. Most still do. When you meet somebody who talks about having grown up on a ranch, but isn't in ranching, it's because the "ranch" was a 20 acre plot outside of town (not a ranch) or because they were left with no alternative.
What those left with no alternative were given, so that their older brothers could carry on without trouble, was what English "Remission Men" were given in earlier eras. . . something else to do. In a lot of cases, that something else was a career in law or medicine.
That's what Harriet got.
Well, what does that tell us?
Well, quite a lot. A girl from a ranching family who had nowhere to go, she had to marry into agriculture or pursue a career. While I knew her when she was young, a bit, I don't know if there was every a ranching suitor. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there had been, as the tobacco chewing young Hageman was quite cute and very ranchy.
Well, whatever the case was then, she ended up with what lawyers call a boutique firm and made it the focus of her life, seemingly. She ultimately married a lawyer twenty years her senior, more or less, and they didn't have a family for whatever reason. Frankly, it's sad.
She was also left with a heritage that focused on the frontier pioneer myth.
Lots of ranch families have that, and in their heart of hearts believe they should have been given their public lands they were leasing by right, even though they couldn't afford it then, and they couldn't now. They often don't believe that other people really work, as they falsely believe that their own work is exceptionally hard. Many believe, at least in the back of their minds, that they are the population of the state, and those who aren't in agriculture are only able to get by as agriculture supports them.
It's a false, but deeply held, narrative.
And hence Hageman's, in my view, desire to transfer public lands from the Federal Government. In her mind, I suspect, those lands somehow, magically, go write to farmers and ranchers who, in her view, probably, rightfully deserve them.
That's not, of course, what would happen. It'd actually destroy ranching. But being from the Wyobraska wheat belt, where most agriculture is farming, and the land is already publicly held, she doesn't realize it.
And she hasn't been on the farm, really, since sometime in the late 1970s or early 80s, at least in the sense we're talking about.
The whole thing is really sad, quite frankly. But personal grief shouldn't make for bad public policy.
What's the deal with Lummis and Barrasso.
Let's take Barrasso up first.
Barrasso isn't a Wyomingite and its an open question to what extent he identifies with the state or its people at all. He's from Reading Pennsylvania, and the son of an Italian American cement finisher who had left school after 9th grade and an Italian American mother. He was born in 1952, putting him solidly in the Baby Boomer generation. The beneficiary of a Catholic education, he came here as a surgeon.
He's nearly the archetypical Baby Boomer, and in more ways than meets the eye. But to start off with, he was the child of hardworking blue collar Italians from the Catholic Ghetto who were probably bound and determined not to see him suffer they way they had, so they aimed for the blue collar mid Century minority's dream. . . send your kids into a profession and they'd really be something. Hence why there were so many Irish American, Italian American and Jewish American lawyers and doctors.
But a lot of that dream really went awry.
Dr. Barrasso and his first wife Linda had two children. His ex wife has had a local public life, but remains pretty quiet about their marriage. She remarried to a local lawyer.
Barrasso remarried too to a widely loved local woman who had been to law school, but who was not barred. She's since tragically died of brain cancer. I knew her before their marriage.
None of this is facially surprising or atypical, but in context, its' revealing. Barrasso's early connection with Wyoming was professional. That's why he came here. And his early life has the appearance of being very Catholic. That is significant.
It's significant in that when Barrasso was growing up, Catholics did not divorce easily and bore the brunt of having done so for the rest of their lives. In my family, back before World War One, or around it, one of my mother's uncles divorced and remarried and the relationship with the family was completely severed. Apparently it was later somewhat repaired, but only somewhat. Leaving a spouse and leaving the faith was a betrayal. It's still not taken lightly by serious Catholics.
But seriousness was not what the Baby Boomer generation was about. It was about "me". The couple divorced, for some reason, and he remarried. The whys of the topic were never raised in his political career as post 1970s, that isn't done.
It probably should be.
Barrasso has pursued his political career the way it seems he pursued his life. He compromised. He compromised on his faith (he's now a Presbyterian) and he's compromised in his political views. He was a moderate, but now is Trump's lap dog. His views change when they need to change. Apparently here, he thought it better to side with Lee and stay as quite as possible.
What about Lummis?
I know very little about Cynthia Lummis, which frankly is fairly typical of Wyomingites. He website says she was born on a Laramie County ranch, but Wikipedia just states Cheyenne. Her father was active in Republican politics and she, a lawyer, was elected state treasurer at one point. Like Hageman, she has an agricultural degree. She's a Missouri Synod Lutheran, which puts her in a very conservative branch of the Lutheran faith, but that appears to have no bearing on this matter.
She tends to stay out of public view for the most part.
On the public lands matter, her connection with a southeast Wyoming ranch may indicate something. As noted here, there's very little public land in the eastern part of Wyoming. But overall, we just don't know very much about her. She's basically a legacy of an earlier era in Wyoming when we didn't feel it was important to really know too much about a person.
Maybe we should.
Footnotes:
1. Blessings on the hand of women!
Angels guard its strength and grace,
In the palace, cottage, hovel,
Oh, no matter where the place;
Would that never storms assailed it,
Rainbows ever gently curled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Infancy's the tender fountain,
Power may with beauty flow,
Mother's first to guide the streamlets,
From them souls unresting grow—
Grow on for the good or evil,
Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Woman, how divine your mission
Here upon our natal sod!
Keep, oh, keep the young heart open
Always to the breath of God!
All true trophies of the ages
Are from mother-love impearled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Blessings on the hand of women!
Fathers, sons, and daughters cry,
And the sacred song is mingled
With the worship in the sky—
Mingles where no tempest darkens,
Rainbows evermore are hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
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