In Elia Kazan's The Sea of Grass, Jim Brewton, Spencer Tracy’s character, argues that cattle grazing serves the land better than homestead farming, an argument John H. Lenihan takes at face value when he claims that Brewton “expresses genuine affection for the rich grasslands, which he correctly believes would be ruined by the homesteader’s plow” (100). Lenihan compares the The Sea of Grass to New Deal documentaries with both a conservationist and communal message. In stark contrast, we assert that The Sea of Grass constructs Brewton as a “frontier empire-builder” rather than an agent for community building, so the film, and Lenihan’s reading of it, begs questions. The connection between Pare Lorentz, a major director of New Deal documentaries, and Kazan, the director of The Sea of Grass, however, seems to have influenced Kazan’s attempt at an environmental message, an attempt that we believe falls flat in relation to Brewton’s unlimited drive to conquer the plains and maintain his claim to the range.
Instead of taking Brewton’s claims and the film’s narrative structure at face value, we suggest it invites an ecocritical reading that demystifies the dichotomies on which it rests—that between cattle ranchers and homesteaders in the 1880s Southwest. The film asserts that free-range ranching maintains the plains in their original state, just as did the buffalo and the Indian, and demonstrates that homestead farming destroys the plain, turning it into a dustbowl on screen like that invoked in Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936). What is missing from the film are the repercussions of unfettered grazing environmental historian Mont H. Saunderson warns about in 1949. Although Brewton sees a clear ecological dichotomy between free-range ranching and homesteading, with free-range ranching benefiting grasslands and homesteading destroying them, research even from the film’s period suggests otherwise. Studies from the 1970s forward demonstrate that free-range ranching contributed more to the loss of range ecology than any other farming method.
Brewton sees himself and other ranchers as the rightful “owners” of the range and denigrates the homesteader who does not build an empire with his own hands but on the backs of those who came before him:
Chamberlain, I have sympathy for the early pioneer who risked his life and his family among the Indians, and I hope I have a little charity for the nester who waited until the land was safe and peaceable before he filed a homestead of someone else who fought for it. But when that nester picks land like my big Vega, a thousand feet above the sea which nature intended for grazing land and always will be grazing land, when he wants to plow it up to support his family when there isn’t enough rain for the crops to grow. When he only kills the grass that will grow when his crops starve for water and he ends up killing my beef and becomes a man without respect for himself and a menace to the territory, then I have neither sympathy nor charity…. Boggs is only a sample of what will happen if others try it.
When the film’s protagonist, Jim Brewton, introduces his new wife, Lutie Cameron (Katharine Hepburn), to his large ranch, Brewton reinforces his belief that free-range ranching best serves the land, again establishing himself as the superior pole in the binary between free-range and fenced ranching. He looks at the land and states, “Well, first of all I guess I hear the buffalo” and when Lutie asks him what else he hears, and he explains his arguments for a free-range approach while looking down on the grass,
I can remember the first time I saw her. We’d come a long way. And nobody was telling us about any surprises. We just came over the hill and there she was, sort of lying there all alone. Nobody wanted her then, except the antelope, the buffalo, and the Indians, so we took her, and we set her up right for cow country. We fought for her. Our blood sunk in every mile. Indian blood, too. I’m not so proud of some of that. My brother’s out there. It’s kind of the way God made it and wants it to stay, and I’ve got a hunch that He wants me to keep it that way.
He has defeated both the native range animal—the buffalo—and the region’s indigenous peoples. Yet he sees himself and his cattle as native rather than imported and hence as making no mark on the landscape of which they are a natural part. He also designates himself as the land’s protector with a manifest destiny to “keep it that way.”He does not acknowledge the irony. He has acquired this land only after destroying its original inhabitants. Instead, he asserts that the land is the same for him and his cattle as it was for the buffalo and American Indians before him. The film reinforces Brewton’s assertions about the dangers of homesteading, first by demonstrating that ranchers and homesteaders cannot coexist because their methods contradict one another, and then by illustrating dire consequences of homesteading—destroying the grass and contributing to long-term drought and dustbowl conditions. What it doesn’t do is show the damage free range ranching did to the sea of grass Brewton fights to preserve.
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