Joseph Kinsey Howard was an American newspaper editor, regional historian, social and political critic.
Background
Joseph Kinsey was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1906. He was the son of John Riggen Howard and Josephine Kinsey Howard. In 1911 the family moved to Taber, Alta. , Canada, where his father became general manager of a coal mine owned by a Canadian-American syndicate. His mother, a woman of talent and enterprise, moved thirty miles west to Lethbridge, Alta. , in 1916, where she worked in a music store and then became society and church editor for a local newspaper. Since she greatly influenced her son's future career in journalism, it is likely that she provided the principal, if not the sole, parental guidance from that time. She moved with her son to Great Falls, Mont. , in 1919; there is no indication that John Howard joined them there, and he died in Seattle, Wash. , in 1924, apparently alone.
Education
Howard graduated from Great Falls High School in 1923.
Career
In 1923 he became a reporter for the Leader, a daily newspaper there. Three years later he became its news editor, a post he held for eighteen years. In 1943 he published Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome, a notable work in regional history and social criticism in which he presented his state's development in a series of brilliant sketches that unveiled the exploitation of its resources by the bonanza mining operators and cattle ranchers and graphically portrayed the grim struggle for survival by wheat ranchers who plowed up the grassland, only to see it blown away by harsh winds. He also used the work to applaud the New Deal efforts to carry out John Wesley Powell's plan of 1878 to replace the rectangular surveys and small farms with cooperative grazing and small farm communities adapted to the demands of aridity. The noted historian Bernard DeVoto characterized Howard's book as the most realistic and penetrating he had read in its understanding of the intermountain West. In Montana, Howard's criticism of the Montana establishment was considered so shocking that at first it was sold only under the counter.
From 1944 to 1946, Howard was research associate for the Montana Study, a project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Montana. Designed to determine how the quality of small-town and rural life could be improved, the study permitted Howard to deepen his understanding of human resources and to promote the development of the arts by the people. He concluded that the projects sponsored by the Montana Study had enabled dwellers in small and remote communities to obtain a "richer fulfillment as participants in their own cultural development in contrast to urban residents who are too often merely spectators" (Northwest Harvest, p. 126). Howard thought that community interaction would revitalize regional culture and arrest "the retreat from life, " the movement toward "vindictive nihilism and war against life, " which he saw as an international phenomenon of his day.
As a by-product of his interest in the Montana Study, Howard edited Montana Margins: A State Anthology (1946), a collection of literary and historical materials selected to elucidate local life for students and the general public. A deeply personal testament to the richness of the Montana experience, Montana Margins illustrated Howard's belief that a synthesis of economic, social, and literary studies was necessary to understand a community and that the historian has a "primary responsibility" to "affect a synthesis in terms of human beings" (Montana Magazine of History, Oct. 1952). The statement showed Howard to be an early advocate of the emerging academic discipline of American studies. Howard's life after 1946 was devoted to writing, lecturing, and promoting the development of regional history and literature, the latter as director of the annual writers' conference at the University of Montana, Missoula.
His last book, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest, published posthumously in 1952, is a sympathetic history of Louis Riel and the Métis (half-breeds) of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, who twice in the late nineteenth century rebelled against arbitrary rule, first by the Hudson's Bay Company and then by the Dominion of Canada. In this work Howard championed the underdog and clearly revealed the dehumanization arising from discrimination against minorities and the dispossessed.
Howard died at Choteau, Mont. , of a heart attack. He was barely forty-five years of age, his career unfinished. His ashes were carried by friends on horseback up Flattop Mountain, overlooking the main range of the Rockies, and scattered to the winds.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
At his death the novelist A. B. Guthrie, Jr. , called him "Montana's conscience the greatest Montanan of our time, perhaps of any time. "