The Old West Lives Yet
Plus: Cicero, a naval glee club, and unprofitable treason.
Some days, I get to roam the wide open spaces that lie beyond the cramped zone of public policy. In that vein, I’ve written an essay for the launch of Keinrath Publishing, a truly delightful new website featuring longish-form pieces on culture and history. Besides my own submission, I commend to you those of all my fellow authors.
Within my family photo albums many pictures of a young David McGarry in full cowboy attire are hidden. (My collection of cap-gun six shooters is formidable.) The West and its story form, the Western, staked a claim to quite a lot of mental territory as I grew up. My thoughts and playtime were filled with Kit Carson and Wyatt Earp, John Wayne and Louis L’Amour.
Hence, I’ve written something that searches out why, exactly, the West and the Western has remained so potent a symbol of Americanism, and why this time in history — and the stories and myths told about it — has persisted so long in our minds and in our culture. (Though their place is slipping; see below.)
I begin thus:
In 1890, the United States Census Bureau declared the American Frontier closed. In posterity’s eyes, at least, it brought a neat finality to the Westward expansion. Yet 1890 did not end the Old West as an ideal, as a way of life, as an aesthetic, or as a part of America’s national identity. No, even as the saloon doors of the Frontier were swinging shut, the men and women who had lived the West had begun writing its legends. Buffalo Bill Cody debuted his Wild West show in 1883; Wyatt Earp, the lawman of Dodge City and of Tombstone, would retire to Hollywood to make movies. The Great Train Robbery roared onto the screen in 1903, becoming the first enduring motion picture of its genre. In the final scene, a bandit fires his six shooter directly into the camera. Audiences gaped — and demanded more. Early Hollywood went wild for Westerns: William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and other silent-era stars rode and shot their ways across the theater screens and into the hearts and minds of early-20th-century America. A few decades on, the Western ascended to its apex, with such directors as John Ford and actors as John Wayne, securing its lofty place in American cinema and culture.
The Western was more than an on-screen phenomenon. In the mid-century, Louis L’Amour transcended his unprofitable career writing for pulp magazines to become the West’s greatest literary troubadour:
“I sing of arms and men, not of presidents, kings, generals, or passing explorers, but of those who survived their personal, lonely Alamos, men who drove the cattle, plowed their furrows, built their shelters against the wind, the men who built a nation,” L’Amour wrote. “I do not need to go to Thermopylae or the Plains of Marathon for heroism. I find it here on the frontier.”
The piece traverses the soaring peaks of philosophy and literature, the valleys of early 2000s popular culture, the arid deserts which the disaffected of Generation Zero have created for themselves online. Its characters are Aristotle, George Washington, John Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winston Churchill, and, of course, the men and women who won the West.
A common sub-genre of Western deals with the man who was molded by times that are now passed — The Gunfighter being an excellent example. Notwithstanding its staying power, it seems that the Western’s time might be fading in just such a way. Far fewer Westerns are made these days, and the cowboy — while still recognizably and emphatically American — has receded as a cultural icon.
Sometimes, however, the troubles of times call for somebody, or something, from the past. I argue that these times call for a reexamination of the West and, hopefully, a revival of the Western.
On that journey, America might find its way back to its best self.
Some Wisdom
Keeping law and order is neither a matter of punitive vengeance nor of universal mercy doled out unthinkingly to all offenders.
Cicero, in his moral treatise, On Duties, writes thus:
[G]entleness of spirit and forbearance are to be commended only with the understanding that strictness may be exercised for the good of the state; for without that, the government cannot be well administered. On the other hand, if punishment or correction must be administered, it need not be insulting; it ought to have regard to the welfare of the state, not to the personal satisfaction of the man who administers the punishment or reproof.
We should take care also that the punishment shall not be out of proportion to the offense, that some shall not be chastised for the same fault for which others are not even called to account. In state administering punishment it is above all necessary to allow no trace of anger. For if anyone proceeds in a passion to inflict punishment, he will never observe that happy mean which lies between excess and defect.
Some Beauty
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is a beautiful all-American song, and the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club sung it beautifully at today’s inauguration.
The Union forever, indeed!
Some Humor
Sir John Harrington’s epigram “On Treason:”
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
Sundry Links, &c.
Townhall: “The Fraudulent Populism of Our Leaders”
RealClearMarkets: “The Fraudulent 'National Security' Case Against Nippon and U.S. Steel”
Blogpost: “The Subsidy and the Stranglehold”