He graduated from a Free Methodist secondary school in Wessington Springs, South Dakota, and attended junior college in the area.
[1] In 1945, Fite began teaching at the University of Oklahoma alongside other prominent historians such as Edward Everett Dale and Carl Rister.
During his early years at the institution, Fite published numerous articles and monographs, including the first carving records and major study done on the Mount Rushmore National Monument.
His first work, an expansion of his doctoral thesis, was an investigation into how Peter Norbeck, a South Dakota politician, helped secure federal support for agricultural programs and the Mount Rushmore National Monument.
Fite's work was one of the first to bring ideas of historical agency to those who chose to live in the Great Plains while also explaining how agriculture became the dominant economic engine of the region due to decisions made by these early American settlers.
Both works focused heavily on how the political and economic power of agricultural peoples shrank in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
[6] Cotton Fields No More continued this sort of analysis, shifting the focus to the southern United States after the Civil War and argued in a similar vein that political and technological changes caused small-scale farmers to leave agriculture.