COWBOY PRESIDENTS

The Frontier Myth and U.S. Politics since 1900

DAVID A. SMITH

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

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For my parents

Jack and Doreen Smith

in their sixty-ninth year of marriage

With love

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Frontier Myth

1. Theodore Roosevelt: The First Cowboy President’s Progressive Frontiers

2. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Showdowns for Progress”

3. Myth in a Quagmire: Vietnam and LBJ’s Second Presidency

4. The Hinge: Ronald Reagan and the Conservative Resurgence of the Frontier Myth

5. Reagan’s Policy Frontiers at Home and Abroad

6. George W. Bush: The War on Terror and the Frontier Myth

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cowboy Presidents is based on my PhD dissertation. Much of the credit for anything worthwhile in this book, and none of the blame for its faults, go to my gifted PhD supervisor, Keith Carlson, who provided numerous key foundational ideas and insights, kept me on track, and offered his extensive knowledge generously from day one. My thanks also goes to Gary Zellar, for his enthusiasm, support and knowledge of character studies, and important guidance and contributions to earlier drafts of the work. My PhD committee members were all a great pleasure to work with: Bill Bartley and Lindsey Banco shared their literary and cinematic knowledge and made key revisions to the study, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen brought her important anthropological perspective to this endeavor. Thanks also to my committee chair, Richard Julian, and to the faculty and staff in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department and Graduate Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, who were incredibly supportive.

Two mentors from my six years as an undergraduate and master’s student at the University of Victoria must be acknowledged here. Ted Wooley, an inspiring professor, MA supervisor, and friend: you are very much missed. And the brilliant Brian Dippie, whose own scholarship provided much of the intellectual foundation for this book. Their respective enthusiasm for US politics and the American West were highly contagious.

University of Oklahoma Press (OUP) managing editor Steven B. Baker, independent copy editor Bob Land, then editor in chief Adam C. Kane, and the staff all made this publishing experience an entirely positive and fulfilling one. Special thanks to then OUP director B. Byron Price, whose sole-authored “Cowboys and Presidents” edition of Convergence (spring–summer 2008) helped spark the idea for this study a dozen years ago.

I met several outstanding archivists and librarians who went the extra mile to help me track down many resources and contacts vital to this project. The LBJ Library in Austin is a model institution, and I have many people to thank for my two weeks’ research experience there, including subject archivists Allen Fisher, Liza Talbot, Barbara Cline, and John Wilson; Margaret Harman in A/V collections; registrar Michael MacDonald; along with reference archivists Lara Hall, Brian McNerney, Scott Seely, and Will Clements. My special thanks to Sharon Kilzer, project manager of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, and staff who were simply amazing in providing a plethora of TR resources all brought together in one location (and just down the road aways from Saskatoon). The staff of the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, provided advice and access to some especially fascinating audiovisual and campaign materials.

Key financial support for this dissertation came from a Moody Research Grant through the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, a White House Historical Association Research Grant, University of Saskatchewan sabbatical grant, and the University of Saskatchewan Library.

Thanks to the University of Saskatchewan Library for its strong relief support at key stages of the project and to my wonderful colleagues in the University of Saskatchewan Library: Diana Kichuk, Deborah Lee, and Susan McConkey. Special thanks to librarians extraordinaire Donna Canevari de Paredes and Ken Whiteway for their encouragement and constant support.

To my brother, Paul Smith, thank you for sparking my interest in both history and westerns at an early age, and for always being there.

Most of all I am grateful to my nuclear family, who shared this experience with me every day since the journey began: my wife, Yumiko, and our daughters, Emily and Rachel, for their amazing encouragement, patience, and endurance.

INTRODUCTION

THE FRONTIER MYTH

Human beings make myths, tell stories about ancient times and great events, and call such times and events to mind over many generations, for all sorts of reasons. But many of these reasons are political.

—Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, 2010

Few would deny that the frontier myth as it relates to American society, character, and politics has so effectively captured Americans’ imagination that it has deeply woven into the nation’s consciousness and psyche. What is less well appreciated is the way the frontier myth has changed over time in response to historical events and processes, and how, in turn, events and procedures have come to be understood through the lens of frontierism. The 1890s began the era that first codified the “frontier thesis” of American history when it was cogently and persuasively argued that Americans had evolved a unique and superior civilization due to the impact of the frontier experience.

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) contended that as American settlers moved westward they did so across five “fall lines” that saw a “perennial rebirth” of society in each new region.[1] There, on the frontier, occurred a social evolution from the primitive savage to the advanced urban society. Turner measured this process by the recurring appearance of the same occupational types in a set order: traders, ranchers, pioneer farmers, intensive farmers, and finally the urban occupations. At each new “meeting point between savagery and civilization,”[2] civilized easterners were supposedly reduced to a more primitive state and then forced to reorient themselves. Therefore, the farther west one went, the more exceptionally “American” they would become as they moved farther away from the influences of Europe and toward the creation of a unique nation. One needed to look primarily to the West (the real America), then, not only to understand the development of that region but that of the rest of the nation as a well.

According to the most frequently singled-out passage of Turner’s thesis,[3] the existence of a rugged frontier and four hundred years of Americans being in contact with it had created a new breed of person and a new type of culture. Turner asserted,

To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

While Turner also detected in the western communities a growth of excessive individualism and weakening of a civic spirit, he simultaneously built up the frontiersman as epitomizing the egalitarian democrat who rises against the corrupting and phony complexity of eastern (i.e., excessively European) institutions. This “abundance of free land” had accounted for the American character and democracy, and now that the frontier was closed off (as made “official” in an announcement by the US Census Bureau in 1891), the consequences for the nation’s future remained uncertain.[4]

Similar characteristics had earlier been attributed to Western frontiersmen and hunters in Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West series published from 1885 to 1894. The future president praised the pioneering westerner’s rugged individualism “tempered by sound common sense.” By contrast, while TR respected American Indians for their warrior prowess, they clearly represented the forces of evil and obstruction, preying on newly arrived settlers: the antiprogressive principle of the few who stood in the way of many. Going against such evil demanded great courage, and those (white Protestant) Americans who possessed that courage were well on their way to heroic status. Like Turner, Roosevelt was deeply nostalgic of the frontier past, and his works express some apprehension about the future; but there was also an optimistic bent to Roosevelt’s writings not seen in Turner’s thesis and an apparent determination to see the progressive-frontier dynamic carried forward into the twentieth century. Roosevelt also became a key figure in the wilderness movement, believing that contact with (and, relatedly, protection of) the wilderness would help the country rid itself of “flabbiness” and “slothful ease.” For Turner, Roosevelt, and like-minded protagonists, the significance of the frontier was simply enormous: to understand American history one had to understand western history.

The frontier and its disappearance is America’s most powerful and persistent myth. Definitions of the term “myth” itself are diverse. Mircea Eliade, in his classic work, Myth and Reality, told us that it would be very difficult to come up with a definition of myth that all scholars would accept. He did offer some guideposts, however. In his description of the structure and function of myths, Eliade wrote that “myth is always related to a ‘creation,’ it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts.”[5] He added “that in one way or another one ‘lives’ the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.”[6] In terms of rhetoric, communications scholar Janice Hocker Rushing contended that the term refers to “a society’s collectivity of persistent values, handed down from generation to generation, that help to make the world understandable, support the social order, and educate the society’s young. Myths . . . are widely taught and believed. They are expressed in the dominant symbols and rituals of culture.”[7] Myth and religion scholar Joseph Campbell likewise asserted that “myths offer life models.” He also points out that these models change over time, that “the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living.” As Campbell put it in a conversation with journalist (and former press secretary to Lyndon Baines Johnson) Bill Moyers, “You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight”[8]—a matter we return to at the end of this book.

With their focus on the frontier experience, Turner, Roosevelt, and similar-minded writers struck a responsive chord with the nation at the outset of the twentieth century, which, in a sense, facilitated the shift of the American West from a geographic space to a place of the mind (a frontier, an idea, a mythic country).[9] It became a stridently national myth, not a regional one. Speaking of film and novels, G. Edward White was the first scholar to observe, “We do not have ‘Easterns’ or ‘Southerns’—which would be sectional. We have Westerns—since America was, at the outset, all frontier.”[10] From the outset, the frontier idea held great appeal for the American people because it provided a usable history for a public becoming increasingly conscious of its role as a world power and “equally self-conscious about the [historical] brevity of their national identity.”[11] The frontier past provided for an American past as impressive and magnificent as those of any European power, an American landscape as impressive as any, anywhere in the world, and heroes and myths that fully matched those in the Old World. Many were, in fact, the same old myths transposed. The frontier myth gave credence to a fundamental tenet in America’s national mythology, American exceptionalism, and its accompanying sense of mission. Turner defined American exceptionalism as synonymous with democracy and linked it for all time with the West. In the place where “the wilderness masters the colonist,” the “outcome is not Old Europe. . . . Here is a new product that is American.”[12] And out of this mystical process allegedly grew the American brand of egalitarian democracy and the molding of the American character. As Charles A. Beard later declared, Turner’s essay on the frontier had “a more profound influence on thought about American history than any other essay or volume ever written on the subject.”[13] It is a frontier image that became too much of the national ethos to go away.

In terms of historical accuracy, the alleged demise of the frontier resulted in an overstimulated imagination. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Significance of the Frontier” essay contains numerous and substantive historical errors, as many scholars, from Earl S. Pomeroy to Gerald D. Nash to Richard White, have exposed. These include, among others, Turner’s “orderly” movement westward (the Californian west coast was, in reality, settled before the interior); “radical” politics (westerners often could not vote and were typically conservative as opposed to being democratic innovators); distinctive culture (many settlers were “desperately imitative” of the East); liberal economics (cowboys as employees reliant on eastern capital and the role of government-funded projects rather than rugged individualists); the West as a region composed of Anglo-Saxon males (Native Americans and women were there too, and an estimated one-third of cowboys were either black or Mexican[14]); and his depiction of American civilization as superior and benevolent to those of the conquered (New West historians point out that the “advancement” more resembled an “invasion” and brought exploitation and abuse of Native Americans and environmental destruction to the landscape).[15] But Turner’s arguments expressed what so many Americans wanted to believe, and what served their self-interest to believe to be true: that regardless of whether he got his facts right, his overall arguments were widely considered bona fide and correct. This enthusiastic acceptance was also due to the fact that where Turner fell short as an historian he succeeded powerfully as a mythmaker and because many of the ideas found in his thesis had been out there for a long while. In fact, as Richard Slotkin has pointed out, many elements of the Turner thesis and of Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning of the West promoted ideas about the frontier that dated back to the colonial period (and had, in part, been transplanted from Europe). This includes the beliefs that westward pioneering was part of a national mission—or what would become known in the nineteenth century as a “Manifest Destiny”; created settlements out west as a refuge from the tyranny and corruption of Europe or later eastern America; provided a safety valve for the anxieties and problems of the cities; opened up a land of great wealth and opportunity (a “Golden West,” as Earl Pomeroy phrased it) for enterprising individualists; and allowed the American nation to tap into an inexhaustible source of national wealth on which a future of sky’s-the-limit prosperity could be founded.[16]

Elliot West identifies another alluring element of the frontier myth. Since the earliest days of the republic, West observes, Americans have been conflicted over their infatuation with both urban progress and a glorified rural past. They have reached forward for new ideas and improvements while making heroes out of those who lived rugged lives in a vanished age. For Alexis de Tocqueville, writing almost two centuries ago, the average American suffused over a rapidly changing world with a nostalgic drive to restore a vanished past; the American was, in a phrase proposed by historian Marvin Meyers, a “venturous conservative.”[17] The frontier or western myth has proven the perfect venue for displaying that conflict of interests and loyalties: the pull between old and new, nostalgia and progress that deepened in the twentieth century with its sweeping technological and social change and the promise (and fear) that new innovations would propel Americans forward away from the past—and Americans’ desire to harness those glorious, pastoral images and larger-than-life characters that made up their heroic “good old days.” All, Elliot West observes correctly, were an expression of America’s complicated and complex national character.[18]

The tensions between the demands for individualism and the needs of the community and of tolerance also remain strong throughout the history of the western frontier myth. Here was Turner’s vital opposition in the old frontier, the meeting place between savagery and civilization. Jenni Calder has summed up the “basic paradox” of the American West: “On the one hand there is the instinct to preserve a heroic tradition that is aggressive, violent, and potentially anarchic. On the other there is the deliberate building up of solid community values, the relating of the developing territories of the West to the United States as a whole and the emphasis of those warm, homely qualities that have for so long flourished side by side with the cult of the violent loner.”[19] Turner argues that the two American qualities of tolerance and individualism are in perpetual conflict. The two greatest achievements of the frontier—the construction of a libertarian American individual and the creation of centralized federal power—are directly contradictory to one another.[20]

Ray Allen Billington contended that most Americans found that “the outstanding feature of the frontier thesis was optimism,” which “satisfied the need of Americans for a rose-tinted view of the future.”[21] After a Herculean struggle against the untamed wilds of the West (including, in the popular mind, “uncivilized” Indians and un-American domestic outlaws), the American people emerged triumphant and, according to the myth, proved themselves capable of dealing with any subsequent problem or challenge—even those centered in the crowded stresses of an industrialized, urban sprawl, or associated with international global politics.

COWBOY PRESIDENTS AND THE MYTH

What earlier historians have identified as internal contradictions within the frontier myth that apparently were in need of reconciliation, this study repositions as semiotic flexibility that created within the frontier myth an elasticity allowing it to shift to accommodate changing political circumstances—even as it worked to shape those very circumstances. Keeping in mind these various facets and tensions, this book explores how the four presidents who most closely aligned themselves with the frontier myth and imagery of the Old West—Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush—strategically, and at times unconsciously, deployed frontier imagery to alternatively explain situations and on other occasions to make the complex appear simple. As with Turner’s original articulation of the frontier thesis, the cowboy presidents did not always need the facts behind their use of the frontier myth to be accurate; rather they needed the frontier myth to be persuasive. Interestingly, for most other nations the term “frontier” refers to a border between nations. But in the United States, the twentieth-and twenty-first-century cowboy presidents have used the term very broadly to cover all areas of policy from the frontiers of space to conservation, civil rights, education, the Cold War, gun ownership, national economy, and the war on terror. Arguably, no other myth has embedded itself so deeply in American presidential politics. Importantly the myth’s application and emphases have shifted substantially at watershed periods in the nation’s history so that the turn-of-the-century liberal Theodore Roosevelt’s use of frontier imagery and language would be different from that of postwar liberal LBJ’s, and each of these, in turn, would carry significantly different political messages than either the conservative Reagan or his would-be cowboy imitator George W. Bush (Bush 43).

In the history of presidential politics one finds that the emphasis on either the past or the future—that schizophrenic element of the frontier myth that Elliot West described—has varied significantly in accordance with the political stripe of individual presidents and with events going on both in America and abroad. Roosevelt’s modern methods of engaging with fundamental economic and social change at the turn of century and Johnson’s proactive approaches to civil rights and social programs in the 1960s both typically looked to a future of change and possibilities. By contrast, Reagan’s right-wing prescriptions for economic stagflation and for confronting communism in the 1980s and Bush 43’s responses to the events of September 11, 2001, and a worsening economy two decades later drew deliberately on the imagery of a nostalgic past in the hope of recapturing it to, in the words of the 1980 Reagan campaign sloganeers, “Make America Great Again.”

In this book, the first in-depth and comprehensive study of US presidents’ deployment of frontier myth, I explore how and why this quintessential American vision has worked to advance radically different political agendas. The evidence reveals that major events in US and world history have caused the emphases of the frontier myth to be reshaped, at times abruptly, so that presidents of different eras could attempt to harness this “western” symbolism in promoting their remarkably wide-ranging ideologies and doctrines, while at other times the interpretive power of the myth has blinded American presidents and the public to seeing national and international developments through anything other than glasses with frontier lenses.

The frontier or Old West myth is not a given. Rather, it is a formalized way of thinking, revealed through both language and visual imagery that carries power. Taking part in the frontier myth in the guise of a cowboy president sets up certain self-expectations for a chief executive, shapes that person’s view of the United States and its role in the world, and influences the media and the public’s expectations of what the president will do and how that person will act.

Many historians and other scholars have regarded policy as somehow objectively independent of myth as though it were a product of rational responses to testable facts. But drawing on the approach of intellectual and cultural historians such as Rush Welter, Charles Rosenberg,[22] and in particular, Brian W. Dippie,[23] this study adheres to the contention that myths that people have held in the past can be extremely influential—depending upon who believes and acts upon them. As Rush Welter succinctly phrased it, “Ideas have consequences.”[24] Studying the myth, then, is both useful as a reflection of popular societal attitudes, and as actual shapers of attitudes and policies as well and, as such, is key to our understanding of American history.

Cowboy Presidents explores the myth of the frontier in American thinking (including that of the four presidents), the shape of which has been transformed by events and individuals and shifted from a thesis of liberalism and inclusion to one of conservatism and exclusion. This examination of the frontier myth endeavors to cast well-known thoughts from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries in a new light: to demonstrate that these ideas about the western frontier experience had major consequences for the attitudes, policies, and decisions made by four US presidents who each, arguably, held office during watershed periods in American history. In taking this approach, I hope this book spurs further research and discussion concerning the origins, acceptance, and implications of the idea of the frontier for understanding the nature of presidential politics and policymaking.

Americans have long chosen to draw on the frontier for their mythic identity. But as is the case in Brian W. Dippie’s study of the “vanishing American” Indian, all social structures, including those associated with myths and ideologies, have eventually faced crises so disruptive that these events cannot be fully explained by invoking or relying on the wisdom embodied within them. If the symbolism of the frontier matched the historic experience closely enough, the applicability of the symbolism would be confirmed and even strengthened; but if the two do not fit and no match is made, the culture will either be forced to deny the importance of the event(s) themselves or to change and revise the myth—or at very least its emphasis.

This process of change or revision of myth was first articulated by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. “In a certain anthropology, also notoriously in the study of history,” wrote Sahlins, “we isolate some changes as strikingly distinctive and call them ‘events,’ in opposition to ‘structure.’”[25] Examining the event-structure relationship metaphorically, historian Keith Carlson explained that Sahlins viewed structure as resembling “a river that flows and carries things along in a predictable way.” Carlson added,

Small events are like small rocks that the river simply sweeps over undisturbed. The structure subsumes, explains and is undisturbed by these events. Genuinely historical events are like landslides that divert the channel of water into new pathways. They disrupt the structure and cause it to take new forms, but not entirely new forms. It is still the same river. But Sahlins asks us to examine not only how events effect structure, but how structure shapes events. The two are mutually informing. So the landslide is shaped by the flowing river. The river and islands cannot escape their relationship, without the river the islands are not islands, without the islands the river flows in other directions.[26]

In a broad sense, our understanding of the functioning of history has changed as a result of Sahlins’s insights and arguments. His views have challenged structuralists who saw myths and narrative expressions of structure as largely atemporal, and historians—especially those focusing on events and biography—who seemed, on the other hand, unconcerned with the underlying structures of American society.

If, as John Mack Faragher pointed out, Turner’s thesis is the most influential piece of writing in the history of American history,[27] then studies of the power of myth combined with insights concerning the interplay of structure and event provide a scholarly framework for understanding the role of the frontier myth in American presidential politics and history. Social and cultural structures are powerful because they have the ability to explain and accommodate almost everything that occurs within society. Occasionally, however, an event or series of events occurs that is so profound that the structure cannot subsume it, and so the overall emphases of the structure or the structure itself changes. Similarly the frontier myth creates a structure within which American society and history (past and future) is not only understood but within which it is lived. Though the 1890 census was an event that Frederick Jackson Turner stated had signaled an end to the American frontier experience, the idea of the frontier as defining American society had become deeply entrenched in American thought. The myth outlasted the experience itself and explained how much of American society saw the world.

American literature shows that the ideas of the frontier myth have become such a key underlying structure of American society that it has formed a major part of the nation’s culture and self-identity. This study contends that from the presidential administrations of Theodore Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson, the frontier myth was interpreted and deployed primarily as a forward-looking phenomenon that celebrated inclusiveness, federal government programs, and intervention. TR lived out and, as president, applied aspects of the myth to introduce significant reforms to the American political system in an effort to bring modernity to the federal government and a balance of power to American society in an age of tremendous industrial and corporate growth. Six decades later, Lyndon Johnson tapped into the postwar version of the frontier myth to explain his “guns and butter” approach of prosecuting a land war against a Soviet proxy state in Asia while pursuing his liberal Great Society and war on poverty reforms at home. But a succession of events—beginning with the failure to obtain a quick victory in the conflict in Vietnam and the shocking race riots and assassinations of the late 1960s—caused Americans to seriously question the version of the frontier myth that had provided an adequate narrative for Lyndon Johnson’s programs and policies at home and abroad. These startling setbacks caused the myth itself to be substantively undermined without transforming the entire mythic structure itself. Indeed for a time the frontier myth appeared to go into a kind of hiatus. But as a succession of historical events continued to build upon one another in rapid succession throughout the 1970s—from the international oil crises, economic stagflation, Watergate, and the fall of Saigon in the first half of that decade, to a worsening American economy (in contrast to the economic ascendancy of Japan) and the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis in the latter half—this cumulative landslide of perceived national failures caused the entire frontier mythic structure to shift. Even before leaving office, LBJ had lost control of public support for his domestic and foreign policy programs. By the time the next Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, left the White House in January 1981 the long-standing liberal dominance of the frontier myth was in shambles.

As Cowboy Presidents demonstrates, the entire structure of American frontier symbols and images had shifted political direction from the left to the right—a profound change that scholars or political analysts have not previously identified. This dramatic change in the political nature of presidential associations with the frontier myth is significant and an important phenomenon in the history of American thought and presidential politics. Instead of a forward-looking, progressive vision for America and the world that dominated use of western symbolism for most of the twentieth century, the newer right-wing frontier myth harmonized with the nostalgic aspirations and values espoused by the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan. The self-styled California cowboy Reagan tied into a mythic structure that was now nostalgic and backward looking, anti–“big government,” and exclusionary of those who could be included into the group of real, bona fide Americans. This more recent, narrower, conservative version of the frontier myth was new terrain that would have been unrecognizable in many respects to reforming liberals of their day like TR and LBJ. Events had transformed the structure, just as the structure continued to inform the events—even if it could not fully accommodate or explain them.

A full century after the quintessential cowboy president, Theodore Roosevelt, sat in the presidential saddle, conservative George W. Bush likewise attempted to deploy western symbolism in the aftermath of 9/11 and, in particular, his prosecution of the Iraq War. But while going western may have worked as a boon for Bush’s assertive policies in the early stages, by his second term this reliance on the conservative frontier myth had fallen as flat as it had for the liberal LBJ. And in the twenty-first century, the power of the perceived frontier experience as an ideology for shaping federal policy and economic power appears, like the vanishing American myth, to have once again receded.

Interestingly, since the 1980s, scholars and observers have widely taken for granted that, in the realm of presidential politics and policy making, cowboy symbolism and frontier imagery have always been the property of conservative presidents and politicians.[28] The frontier myth has been portrayed as a touchstone of conservatism for rightist nostalgics who want to restore a way of life that had been “lost” by engaging in an antimodern frontier myth-making of history. But Dippie’s and Sahlins’s insights challenge us to reexamine these conventional assumptions and to rethink the impact of the frontier myth themes and its role in US presidential history. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study’s findings indicate that, in the realm of presidential politics, the dominance of the conservative frontier myth has in fact been a relatively recent phenomenon.

I contend that significant events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have challenged American society and by extension the value of the frontier myth as a way of explaining and understanding America and in so doing caused the frontier myth to change and adapt. This book explores the dynamic tensions that have emerged as various cowboy presidents have sought to deploy the myth to explain and then deal with transformative historical events, and the degree to which these events, as Sahlins alerts us, served to modify and transform the structures of the myth and of American society itself.

THE HINGE

The frontier myth is best understood as a powerful idea that is so deeply entrenched in Americans’ way of viewing themselves and rest of the world that it is capable of providing answers to the nation’s problems and of explaining America’s global role. From the outset, Turner’s thesis was a concept in search of validation; its ambiguous, amorphous characteristics allowed it to be poured into a wide array of molds. As a result, certain US presidents of different eras and political ideologies have chosen to deploy the myth in response to a wide variety of problems and crises plaguing their respective generations. Since the “closing” of the American frontier, four presidents have become most associated with the myth and symbolism of the frontier discourse and epistemology: Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. This book explores how these four American presidents deployed, benefited from (at least initially), and ultimately were constrained in the way in which they dealt with various events by the pervasive and persuasive power of the frontier myth, and ultimately, how the events served to inform and constrain the frontier myth. Each was altered by the other (Sahlins’s “structure of the conjuncture”), in the same way a bronc buster rides and adapts to the horse until one comes along that is too tough to ride. By extension, this study also tests the argument (associated primarily in the non-American foreign press) that certain events, especially foreign wars and economic crises, spurred Americans to look for simple cowboy answers to complex problems. But as I argue, while some of these events and crises could be subsumed, explained, and dealt with according to the myths of the cowboy code and the Old West, other developments overwhelmed the frontier myth and caused the myth itself to change over time.

Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson both used the frontier myth to move American politics to the left on domestic issues while viewing engagement with enemies overseas as the logical and necessary extension of the continental westering experience. Roosevelt’s and Johnson’s policies favored a proactive federal government approach to American problems as opposed to focusing on individualism, and emphasized an optimistic, better-and-brighter forward look toward an American future of limitless possibilities over any desire to return to a nostalgic past. Roosevelt bolstered the role and strength of the federal government with the introduction of the regulation of big business, the vast expansion of conservation programs, and promotion of greater inclusion of minorities into the nation’s melting pot. But by the late 1960s, a liberal version of the frontier myth was in trouble as Johnson’s Great Society—one of the two most ambitious liberal programs in the nation’s history—appeared to falter due in large part to the ever-growing commitment to the failing war in Vietnam. LBJ and American society were struggling to make sense of America’s place in a rapidly changing world and wondered if the old rules of the frontier myth and its assumptions still applied. The tension between individualism and community stretched until it snapped with individualism carrying the day. In 1981, twelve years after Johnson left office, President Ronald Reagan dealt with economic stagflation and incidents associated with America’s Cold War rivals, the Soviets, by looking backward in time to an America that “should have been.” In terms of presidential politics and popular culture, the frontier myth shifted and became the property of radical conservatives as opposed to progressive liberals. Reagan and his handlers tapped into myths and symbols that relied on so-called American tradition, an alternative lifestyle to what was said to be ailing the country based on the simple truths of the Old West: individualism, self-reliance, know-how, and higher values. Reaganites attached themselves to a revised frontier myth characterized by a restorative nostalgia that sought a return to a longing for the good old days, encompassed a rebirth in national pride, and in its darker manifestations, sought out enemies to be vanquished before the imagined homeland of old could be restored.

A shift had taken place, what I argue is best regarded as the hinge from Reagan to LBJ: two political practitioners who came down on diametrically opposite poles—one calling for more government intervention, the other calling for much less—and both counting on the frontier myth to deliver them popular support and a genuine answer to the crises facing their administrations. A dichotomy developed here and with it the discourse was rearticulated; the myth, or at very least its emphasis, adapted and changed—becoming a narrower, less inclusive, conservative voice. Johnson’s attempts to bring the full myth forward collapsed, and a reactionary, nostalgic way of understanding America replaced the more forward-thinking, progressive approach. LBJ, promoter of the public good, was replaced by the deregulator and protector of big business, Ronald Reagan. Here, what Sahlins regarded as the event-structure dynamic took hold of American society. The series of events from 1965 to 1980 had caused the frontier myth structure to shift course and emphasis and accommodated this change. As this study reveals, tumultuous times and LBJ’s own contributions to these events caused the myth itself to be exposed as an inadequate vision out of touch with the realities of the late twentieth century—a vacuum that Reaganites would go to great lengths to exploit. After the crisis event known as 9/11, Republican president George W. Bush deployed his own interpretation of the frontier myth to allow him to react to al-Qaeda and Iraq in certain ways, but as with LBJ, this too largely backfired. For Johnson and Bush, and to a lesser degree TR and Reagan as well, the myth had a discursive power that constrained and liberated actions by creating expectations among the public of what a cowboy nation should and could do. Events that had rendered earlier expressions of the myth less viable for the Democrats in the 1960s and early 1970s would do much the same for the Republican George W. Bush in the 2000s. Today, outside of Texas, when Republicans apply the frontier myth it is almost always in the context of their only other cowboy president icon, Ronald Reagan, rather than the much more controversial Bush. The transformed myth’s eventual inapplicability to Johnson and Bush (though retaining some of the same language) was in part a product of American presidential discourse and policy; more broadly, though, it was a victim of changing historical events and circumstances. The frontier myth in American presidential politics has historically been a pervasive, powerful, and shifting image. And since the days of the Johnson administration, this book contends, the use to which the frontier myth has been put, and the success (or lack thereof) of this deployment by the presidents, has contributed to increasingly deep divisions between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. Today, in the time of Donald Trump, the degree of polarization in politics and society has reached a level of intensity rarely matched in American history.

Chapter 1

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

THE FIRST COWBOY PRESIDENT’S PROGRESSIVE FRONTIERS

Theodore Roosevelt . . . said the spirit of the West was still alive.

He spoke of progress. “The West stands for growth, for progress. So must the whole American people stand. A great democracy must be progressive or it will cease to be either great or democratic. . . . It must either go forward or back, and it becomes useless if it goes backward.”

He spoke of pioneers. “As our civilization grows older and more complex . . . we need a greater and not less development of the fundamental frontier virtues. These virtues include the power of self-help, together with the power of joining with others for mutual help and, what is especially important, the feeling of comradeship and social good-fellowship. Any man who had the good fortune to live among the old frontier conditions must, in looking back, realize how vital was this feeling of general comradeship and social fellowship.”

—“Cheyenne’s Big Day,” Washington Post, August 28, 1910

Theodore Roosevelt (TR) was the original cowboy president and the chief executive with the closest political and personal ties to the frontier myth. Unlike his three later frontier-style successors—Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush—Roosevelt not only responded to and employed the ideas and symbolism of the myth as president, he had lived them out, helped develop many of its features, and wrote about them in a plethora of publications. TR modeled himself closely on the romantic cowboy-frontiersman image and, through his highly publicized exploits, writings, and orations, contributed substantively to the myth’s shape and power in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth. Possibly the best-known American of his times, Roosevelt came to be idolized by millions of Americans as a tough and tenacious, self-made frontiersman who pushed his wilderness adventures to the limit—in locales ranging from the Dakota Territory to San Juan Hill—and then carried his trademark “strenuosity” and “get action” philosophies over to his presidency. TR was the key political figure in creating a way of looking at the frontier as a way for Americans to look at themselves.

One cannot fully understand both the origins of the modern frontier myth structure and the extent of its power without also having an understanding of Theodore Roosevelt and how his own experiences and related ideas developed alongside it. As the myth became increasingly influential, it adapted and changed. Likewise, many of Roosevelt’s views would not remain static over time. Employing the frontier myth as his mantra, TR typically placed himself on the leading edge of an era of intense social change and modernization. Man and myth were inseparable—joined at the hip—and underwent a kind of evolution from the 1880s through Roosevelt’s death in 1919.

THE EDUCATION OF TR AND RISE OF THE FRONTIER MYTH

Throughout the years of Roosevelt’s education and transformation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, his thoughts focused on many of the contemporary cultural preoccupations, which included the realization that the United States was becoming predominantly urban rather than rural, the influx of “new immigrants” from eastern and southern Europe that was changing the nation’s ethnic mix, an increasing awareness of the dramatic changes being wrought by industrialization and new technologies, a growing sense of the complexity of modern society and related treatment of those working in it, a belief that morals and men’s physical strength and closeness to nature were declining, and the quest for some sense of regeneration and reassurance.

During the 1880s and 1890s an increasing number of Americans challenged the prevailing theory that government should stay out of the affairs of business. More and more Americans vigorously questioned and doubted the assumption that individuals left to their own discretion would always act in the public interest. They insisted that there was a public interest that had to be protected from the private interest and became suspicious of the growing power of big corporations. Roosevelt grappled with and carefully considered these issues along with what role the government could and should play in them, and TR did this against the backdrop of his, and increasingly the nation’s, idealized vision of earlier generations’ life on the frontier. How Roosevelt responded to these matters would ultimately strike a responsive chord with much of the American public as the vision he shared of the frontier myth appeared to satisfy the seemingly contradictory needs of reaffirming old values while seeking solutions to new problems in an increasingly urban, industrial America.

In foreign affairs, Theodore Roosevelt and millions of his fellow Americans also held to (and in his case, lived by) the frontier concepts of American exceptionalism and an American mission. Roosevelt was acutely aware of America’s new role of becoming a world power and also of its brief historical experience for creating a clear sense of national identity and unity, thus providing a motivation for both of these concepts. The belief in an American mission was nothing new, Manifest Destiny being the nineteenth-century equivalent. Indeed the idea of the West as a kind of safety valve for the problems of an increasingly urbanized, corporatized, and now modern industrial nation dated back to Thomas Jefferson’s colonial period and had intellectual roots planted even before that in the Old World.

As Brian Dippie and other scholars demonstrated, myths held in the past could be extremely influential—particularly when in the grip of a public relations powerhouse like Roosevelt. The social milieu of the late nineteenth century was in many respects a watershed period in American society and perfectly suited to TR’s rise and the emergence of a powerful strain of the frontier myth. Though the regional frontier itself was now “officially” closed, the idea of the American frontier would emerge stronger than ever.

The forceful, optimistic bent of TR and the frontier myth, as identified by Ray Allen Billington and discussed here in the Introduction, provided a sense among turn-of-the-century Americans that the “taming” of the West—so tough, yet so successful in the eyes of most Euro-Americans—could now be applied to all of the nation’s challenges ranging from crowded cities to foreign affairs. Sahlins demonstrates that social and cultural structures based on myths are highly influential because they have the ability to accommodate almost everything that occurs in society. The close relationship between events, structure, and the frontier myth are unmistakable, and I assert here that Roosevelt’s accidental rise to the presidency in the context of the events of his day essentially guaranteed that the frontier myth would establish itself as the symbolic unifier of the nation—enabling a more robust transition from the traditions and concerns of the old frontier of the nineteenth century to the challenges of the new frontiers of the twentieth.

EARNING HIS SPURS: A FRONTIER PRESIDENT IN THE MAKING

Theodore Roosevelt’s experiences in the badlands out west, while coming of age in his twenties, have long been viewed as changing forever his ideas about the history of the United States and his vision for the nation’s future. His political force of will and constant battles for the right in fitting out a new navy, challenging the tainted meat industry, or promoting his New Nationalism are attributed by scholars and popular observers as resulting in large part from his experience out west. This is not merely perception. Roosevelt very consciously recognized this relationship himself. While visiting Fargo in 1910, Roosevelt told a large crowd, “If it had not been for what I learned in North Dakota, I never in the world would have been President of the United States.”[1]

Roosevelt’s learned willingness to take risks, good-versus-evil conception of the world, sense of democratic egalitarianism and community, and seemingly limitless “strenuosity”—that became integral parts of his Dakota Territory experiences—all arguably made direct connections to his later political career. What has not been understood previously is that as Roosevelt acted on his own belief and faith in the emerging frontier myth, he also played a more significant role in helping shape its early manifestations and several of its long-term features than any other politician.

Theodore Roosevelt had been born into one of the wealthiest families in New York, and his deep and abiding interest in politics and experiences out West were atypical of his eastern establishment heritage. On Valentine’s Day 1884, the future president suffered a heart-wrenching double tragedy when his beloved young wife, Alice, and his mother, Martha, both died within a twelve-hour span in the same house. Before long, TR escaped from his sorrows to a cattle ranch that he purchased on the Little Missouri River, just a few miles from the town of Medora in the Dakota Territory. In the Badlands, for much of the next three years, Roosevelt immersed himself completely into what became two of the great passions of his life: the American frontier West and hunting.

During this western phase of his life, Roosevelt wrote to his close friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “You would be amused to see me, in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” Roosevelt was aware of his own performance. He worked hard to show the public, his ranch hands, and himself that there was substance to his new persona too: that while an easterner by birth, this hombre was not only playing cowboy—he was a cowboy. By the mid-1880s “Theodore Rex”[2] meant business on the hunt, typically setting out with three powerful and custom-made rifles and twelve hundred rounds of ammunition. Richard C. Rattenbury speculated in Hunting in the American West, “Clearly, if surrounded by a battalion of bears, he [Roosevelt] could stand a protracted siege. . . . As it happened the bears came up one at a time.” Roosevelt’s hunts were heavily publicized and especially appreciated by TR and much of the public for their association with the imagined origins of the country and its heroic individuals in the wilderness. Here TR was both maintaining personal and promoting national virility as he labored diligently to create an iconic image for himself that placed a high value on his self-reliant and individual interactions with the frontier. His “putting on the buckskin” symbolized the distance between his new western persona that connected with the primeval origins of the nation and that of the modern, industrial, urban areas.[3]

Frontiersman TR in 1883, and cowboy TR c. 1885. The TR at right is the cool and toughened-up type of individual whom the novelist Owen Wister had in mind when his Virginian responded to an insult with, “When you call me that, SMILE.” (Left: Courtesy Library of Congress, Photographer: George Grantham Bain, Photographs Division, #LC-USZ62–41723; right: Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, R500.P69a-012.)

In addition to these hunting exploits, TR was becoming well known as both a cowboy and a rancher out west. In Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail (1888) he tells of his encounters with a barroom lout, the time he alone faced down five armed Sioux Indians, and once when he led a posse to capture a gang of thieves who stole his boat.[4] In this latter grueling effort, TR’s heavily publicized refusal to be bullied went so far as to have Roosevelt posing for press photos during a staged reenactment of his making the arrest of the three boat thieves. TR knew how to cultivate both good press and his celebrity status.

Biographer John Milton Cooper wrote that “the West seemed to complete Roosevelt’s self-transformation.” From this point onward, TR’s “frontier experience” became an integral part of TR’s political philosophy and public life. In both myth and reality, TR came out of the Badlands and returned to the East robust and transformed: a man who had been remade emotionally, physically, and mentally. TR was now convinced that only through one’s encounters with the wilderness and wild beasts could national vigor be maintained. Out west in the 1880s, he witnessed firsthand the loss of game due to unregulated hunting along with the destruction of grasslands due to overgrazing. These frontiers, he began to argue, needed to be set aside and regulated so that men could disconnect themselves from their regular lives and immerse themselves in a wilderness and live out the frontier experience. Conserving wild spaces in an age of rapid urbanization and development was also a key to TR’s vision and increasingly the nation’s of preserving manhood and national identity.[5]

TR’s experience in the Dakotas had reinforced his belief that evils and dangers in the world needed to be confronted where possible and faced down. Roosevelt had concluded from personal experiences in the West that aggression and insult could only be defeated through determination and strength (“A cowboy,” Roosevelt explained, “will not submit tamely to an insult, and is very ready to avenge his own wrongs”). For the TR of the late nineteenth century, projecting American power throughout the western hemisphere and the Pacific—whether this meant annexing Hawaii and Cuba or teaching the Spanish a lesson in the Philippines—was a logical projection of American power westward that flowed, logically, from the “winning of the West” experience on the frontier.[6]

Another important but often overlooked aspect of Roosevelt’s days living out the frontier experience is that it convinced him that mutual support could be crucial to individual well-being and that practicing communal habits could positively affect the lives of individuals. At various points in his writings, including Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, Roosevelt underscores the fact that “manly qualities” include not only toughness, individualism, and bravery, but also hospitality, cooperation, and camaraderie. Roosevelt himself organized the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, which created and enforced new regulations, dismissed the region’s failed livestock inspector, and banded together to thwart cattle rustlers. Long before TR’s talk of a Square Deal and the New Nationalism, then, his western experience had taught him that mutual support impacts individual well-being.[7]

TR’s related concepts of democratic egalitarianism were also, almost certainly, strongly influenced by his Dakota life. In the Badlands the once-snobbish Roosevelt of his Harvard and Columbia Law School days came to acquire firsthand a genuine respect for “regular” folks and their values. Speaking to an audience of primarily cowboys and cowgirls in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Roosevelt stated that the ideals represented on the frontier were those of the whole country. In terms of progress, he told the crowd, “In continually and earnestly striving for [the] betterment of social and economic conditions in our complex industrial civilization, we should work in the old frontier spirit of rugged strength and courage, and yet with the old frontier spirit of brotherly comradeship and good will.” It is a set of themes—mutual respect, strenuosity, pursuing the public good, democracy, and national unity based on frontier principles—that TR would refer to and act upon frequently during his presidential years and in the decade following them.[8]

HISTORIANS ROOSEVELT AND TURNER: FOUNDATIONS OF THE FRONTIER MYTH

Biographer Edmund Morris has described Roosevelt’s best-selling six-volume book series, The Winning of the West (1889–1896), as “the first comprehensive statement of his Americanism, and by extension (since he ‘was’ America), of himself.” TR had certain agendas in mind that in turn helped shape the evolving contours of the frontier myth. Significantly, the first two volumes of TR’s magnum opus, published in 1889, both emphasized glorifying the individualistic, free outdoorsmen of action: Anglo-Saxon heroes who defeated stubborn Indians who stood in their way. But by volumes 3 and 4, published in 1894 and 1896, respectively, there was a very noticeable shift in tone. Less confident on the declarations of Anglo-Saxon superiority, Roosevelt instead stressed the need for a strong central government to unify the nation’s sense of effort and purpose. Roosevelt warned his readers that by failing to understand the vital need for “‘a strong, efficient, central government, backed by a good fleet and a well-organized army, the men of the West were almost lost to the nation.” Roosevelt’s frontier West, and that increasingly envisioned by the nation, was now first and foremost not a celebration of Anglo-Saxon superiority and isolated individualism but of the triumph of national unity, community, and the efforts of a relatively strong national government.[9] Roosevelt’s later volumes of The Winning of the West also advanced the new idea of an American melting pot, years before playwright Israel Zangwill coined that phrase. “Under the hard conditions of life in the wilderness,” TR explained to his readers, the frontier experience “was enough to weld together into one people the representatives of these numerous and widely different races.” The myth had provided both citizens and recent arrivals to America and to the West, in particular, the opportunity to build a national culture from its diverse elements. As Turner had explained, in this unique country where “the wilderness masters the colonist,” the “outcome is not Old Europe. . . . Here is a new product that is American.”[10]

A year after reading Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Roosevelt sent Turner his first letter, writing of the thesis, “It comes at the right time for me, for I intend to make use of it in writing the third volume of my “Winning of the West.” . . . I think you have struck some first class ideas, and have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.” As historian Douglas Brinkley has pointed out, TR was being generous in his comments, and the two men formed a kind of alliance in promoting the frontier hypothesis: TR being the “popular oracle” and Professor Turner promoting it among his fellow academics.[11]

Historian Richard Slotkin offered a somewhat darker interpretation of Roosevelt’s evolving vision of the frontier than I do here. Slotkin asserted that TR, during his prepresidential career, remained caught up in an elitist, imperialist, and racist view of the frontier that caused him to act as a class-biased and moralizing bully.[12] Slotkin was correct in stating that Roosevelt’s (and Turner’s) imperialist view of western expansion offered an arrogant view of the victors in the long campaigns to “win the West” (with Native Americans cast in the antiprogressive role of the few who stood in the way of the many), but I also contend that, by the 1890s, Roosevelt’s views were becoming more nuanced and complex than has been widely assumed. In TR’s mind, American exceptionalism and in particular its relationship to the frontier model now trumped many of the racial stereotypes of his day. Like Turner, TR had claimed that upon contact with the wilderness, pioneers were stripped of their European traits and that people of diverse ancestry were blended together into a great melting pot that made up the West. And Roosevelt, in particular, did not believe that the old society could ever be restored and accepted: instead TR embraced and sought to influence directly the changing realities of the twentieth century. For the essentially optimistic Roosevelt, progressivism would continue moving Americans toward a better way of life—one that had continually evolved from its frontier roots. Never one to be left in the dust, TR recognized that society was changing and that the meaning and relevance of the frontier experience were also changing. In so many respects Roosevelt was among the people at the forefront of these evolving attitudes.

ROOSEVELT’S EVERYMAN ATTRIBUTES AND COWBOY HERO IMAGE

Much was written at the time and has been since of TR’s acceptance by his fellow cowboys, and almost as much was reported about his respect for them and of “Ol’ Four Eyes’s” apparent transformation from an aristocrat to a democrat as a direct result of his experiences out west.[13] If TR had been born with blue blood, the red-blooded Roosevelt has been regarded as a product of his years in the Dakota Territory. Roosevelt saw himself as having gained an understanding of the American public at large and as one who could and should look out for the general public’s interests. His increasingly common-man persona and closely associated western experience only heightened TR’s popularity and status all the more with the American public and the press. As the Zion’s Herald reported in 1895, “He is as much at home with the ranchers and cowboys of the frontier as at the city club dinner or in the office of the New York Police Board.”[14] Before long TR’s everyman attributes were contributing directly to his growing heroic persona as well. At the midpoint of the 1890s, almost every newspaper account of TR it seemed, included a sketch of cowboy TR reeling and firing from his horse, next to his horse, or in some kind of gritty, heroic pose. All along, his allegedly commonplace origins were played up while his own actual privileged upbringing in New York was not mentioned. Remarkably, Roosevelt the future president was quickly becoming the living, breathing prototype for ten thousand later fictional cowboy figures—all tailored to fit the peculiar social environment in which they were created—in a western industry that would move from dime novels to quality western literature, to pulp magazines, movies, and radio and TV shows.

TOUGH-GUY ROOSEVELT: MASCULINITY, THE ROUGH RIDERS, AND THE FRONTIER MYTH

The social environment of the late nineteenth century, with help from Theodore Roosevelt’s own persona, created the right conditions for establishing masculinity as a key element of the frontier myth. Through self-described accounts including his lengthy cattle drives, decking of a barroom bully, and arrest of boat thieves, Roosevelt became the most popular iconic image of American masculinity. He was the ultimate man’s man: a model of “strenuosity” and willpower for American males of all ages to emulate.

Theodore Roosevelt’s journey to masculinity was both a personal one and a call for national action. The politician-cowboy escaped “the bugaboos of his own emotional past” by constantly hammering against moral weakness, spineless passivity, and the pampered servants of greed and sloth. One of TR’s most influential speeches, aptly titled “The Strenuous Life,” was based on a theme that he would pound home repeatedly. Roosevelt insisted that, as with the ancient Romans, Americans now more than ever needed to reconstruct “a thoroughly manly race—a race of strong, virile character” that would not shrink from the challenges of the new century. Through living out the frontier vision, the moral stagnation of American society could similarly be reversed and its strenuosity regenerated by a self-determined effort to live with strength, vigor, and determination: every hardship and extra effort would only add value to the test.[15]

The nation’s number-one frontier politician faced his ultimate private and public test in 1898. After months of agitating, now assistant secretary of the navy Roosevelt finally got a war with the Spanish in Cuba following the mysterious sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor and subsequent outbreak of the Spanish-American War.[16] When word got out that Roosevelt was looking for volunteers for his own regiment, twenty-three thousand men applied. Roosevelt handpicked one thousand recruits, including cowboys, miners, hunters, Ivy League polo players, ranchers, and a few football players. Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Creeks were among the group as well. “All—Easterners and Westerners, Northerners and Southerners,” wrote Roosevelt, “officers and men, cow-boys and college graduates, wherever they came from, and whatever their social position—possessed in common the traits of hardihood and a thirst for adventure.” Significantly, by de-emphasizing the older Civil War–era distinctions of region and promoting cowboy imagery, Roosevelt helped reinforce the idea of the West as a mythic place and “crucible for the idea of a modern unified nation held together by its parts.”[17] The watershed event in American history, the Civil War determined for the long haul that the structure of the frontier myth and idea of the West itself would of necessity be a national vision as opposed to a regional one. It was a particular vision of American unity that would hold for more than a century.

Michael Collins wrote that Roosevelt’s Rough Rider experience only strengthened TR’s own faith in the frontier ethic: “The western values, ideals, and attitudes which had been deeply ingrained in his thinking during the Dakota years seemed reaffirmed by his association with the cowboy regiment.”[18] And though Roosevelt was second in command of the regiment, its commander—Colonel Leonard Wood—seemed to quickly fade into the background for, as the New York Press observed, the first in command “is lost sight of entirely in the effulgence of Teethadore.” In no time the First Volunteers became known not as Wood’s regiment but as the cowboy “Rough Riders,” the “Roosevelt Rough Riders,” and “Teddy’s Terrors.”[19]

Gary Gerstle wrote, “In the Cuban Campaign, Roosevelt brought to life the mythic past that he had invented for the American people in The Winning of the West.”[20] At San Juan Hill, embedded reporters’ accounts and newsreels seared Roosevelt’s heroic persona into the public mind as his leadership drew exaggerated acclaim. Popular images of the charge up San Juan Hill (actually Kettle Hill) had it all wrong factually, but details mattered little to the public. The press version of the charge seemed for many to capture the essence of American exceptionalism. TR had come to embody the belief in the innate superiority and uniqueness of character that had emerged from the American westering experience, and now the Rough Riders as a group—and “The Colonel” in particular—found themselves elevated to the level of national icons.

“Teddy the Terror,” on the cover of Life, August 4, 1898. (Roosevelt R611.L62, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University)

The Rough Riders fused the cowboy with the soldier, as personified in Theodore Roosevelt himself. One month before the regiment was mustered out of service, “Teddy the Terror” made the front cover of Life magazine. TR in his Rough Rider uniform, sleeves rolled up atop a bucking bronco, had his six guns blazing. His rise in politics was intertwined with his association as a westerner and a soldier. Together with representations of Roosevelt and “his” Rough Riders in cinema, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, parades, and vaudeville stage, the written accounts created a national fiction that helped carry Roosevelt to the White House.

TALL IN THE SADDLE

In just four years, from 1897 to 1901, Roosevelt would rise, in his own words, “like a rocket” from his position as assistant secretary of the navy to the highest public office in the nation. During that period, along with his stint with the Rough Riders, he was elected governor of New York (1898), vice president (1900), and then following William McKinley’s assassination in September 1901, accidentally became the youngest man ever to serve as president at the age of forty-two. Though much of the media coverage of TR had been flattering throughout his career, his vice presidential nomination was not without considerable controversy. Many Democrats and some within his own party were initially convinced that the wild and maverick Roosevelt would run amok as vice president. Kentucky newspaper publisher Henry Watterson feared that TR’s cowboy brain would lead to a dictatorship and reckless imperial adventures. Most famously, a horrified Republican boss, Senator Mark Hanna, declared, “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the White House?”[21] And indeed, there was.

Throughout his reelection bid in the 1900 campaign, McKinley appeared in so many respects the perfect image-making foil for Roosevelt. In photographs the president looked old, plain, hesitant, dour, and out of shape, while TR was highly animated, aggressive, physical, ready for action, and clearly in his prime. McKinley seemed indecisive while Roosevelt was full of purpose. Roosevelt’s dream for a war with Cuba, and his role in it, made him appear the right man for the right war at the right time.

Vice President Roosevelt: “Gentlemen! The Senate Will Come to Order!” (J. Campbell Cory, New York World, March 4, 1901)

In the 1900 election, McKinley and Roosevelt won a convincing victory over their Democratic opponents, William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson. TR quickly became bored with his official, humdrum VP duties, though, and was looking forward to a chance to run in his own right for the Republican nomination the next time around when suddenly McKinley was felled by an assassin’s bullet and TR was thrust into the presidency. Roosevelt came to the office with an unusual mélange of experience, knowledge, and talents and quickly made good on his own trademark phrase to “get action.”

In terms of intellect, Theodore Roosevelt had never been a typical cowman; in fact, he was the most learned of all the presidents since Thomas Jefferson. Roosevelt read books and articles at high speeds on dozens of subjects, wrote thirty-eight books and well over one hundred thousand letters, absorbed great literature in six languages, and remembered what he had learned. A cowboy, naturalist, politician, hunter, rancher, police commissioner, explorer, and historian, TR was the Renaissance man of his generation with an apparently never-satisfied desire for knowledge and for action. In describing himself as a “literary feller” he assigned himself both highbrow and lowbrow status: one that remarkably few Americans could have pulled off successfully in any age and one that helped make the frontier myth even more appealing to all classes of Americans. TR the old-wealth establishment easterner came to consider himself, in spirit, a bona fide westerner, and most Americans embraced him as such.[22]

THE VIRGINIAN AND THE PRESIDENT

In 1902, just months after Roosevelt became president, the publication of The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by TR’s old friend from his Harvard days, Owen Wister, catapulted the frontier cowboy hero to immortality by elevating him to the status of icon and literary figure and beyond the status that dime novels could ascribe. The novelist gave readers of his Virginian a near-perfect cultural hero for the Progressive era: a period dominated by aggressive and virile male heroes who were infused with values of both the primitive and the civilized. TR himself was “deeelighted!” with The Virginian and had every reason to be. Wister was the first writer to create a western hero who was noble and chivalrous enough (due, in part, to his southern origins) to marry a cultured, educated easterner. In doing so he unified the “best” elements of the nation’s supposedly polarized regions. Roosevelt wrote to his friend “old Brigham Smoot” (TR’s nickname for Wister) that he was “immensely proud of the dedication” of The Virginian to the president himself, adding, “I am genuinely proud to be associated with such a work.”[23] Significantly, Wister’s cowman bore a strong resemblance to the new occupant of the White House himself (the book’s dedication to President Roosevelt was no coincidence). “As Larzer Ziff concluded, Wister ‘produced a literature fit for the followers of Theodore Roosevelt.’”[24] The Virginian also underscored what TR’s image represented. “Strenuosity” personified the same types of national traits that he advocated and encouraged Americans to lead. For Roosevelt as president, the same courage and strength that his friend Wister had described as characterizing America’s frontier horsemen of the Old West needed be applied to the problems of the modern age.

The Virginian’s impact would be difficult to overestimate: it is possibly the most read novel ever written by an American.[25] Wister’s success unleashed a tsunami of westerns, mostly cowboy books that found a huge market while carrying readers deeper and deeper into their belief in the frontier myth. Even today, Wister’s Virginian remains received by many Americans and others as a highly engaging and believable personification of their “exceptional” national identity.[26] In the first decade of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt greatly benefited from its immense success and timely publication.

PIONEER PRINCIPLES FOR A NEW CENTURY

With some help from his friends, the new president was poised to be the first occupant of the White House to deploy the frontier myth structure not only to foreign and domestic situations—events—but also to specific policy agendas that Roosevelt developed and implemented. TR’s presidential administration and his active years in politics that followed would represent the first time the myth became so entrenched as a wide-ranging framework that it could account for the complete range of the American national experience. The symbolism of the frontier seemingly matched historic experience to a T (as in Theodore), confirming and strengthening the myth. As the nation’s number-one cowboy and commander in chief, Theodore Roosevelt—the myth personified—would now apply the lessons, values, and ambitions of the frontier experience to bring significant change to the American political system and society—some to be achieved in the short term and others in the administrations of future presidents. The structure of the myth in terms of presidential politics would be defined with a sense of liberal optimism, proactive government, unity, and purpose that would dramatically shape the contours of national politics for decades to come.

Roosevelt was not only the first but, arguably, the most fascinating of the cowboy presidents because he lived out his life and career with the constant aim of self-improvement and progress. By the end of the nineteenth century, especially after the closing of the frontier was announced, Americans strongly desired a cure and healing of their social wounds and the seeming malaise of their condition. They were amazed by what industrialization had achieved but also painfully aware of the fact that it had destroyed a great deal of what they regarded as unique about their nation too. The power of machines and the nature of America’s cities left the impression that they had strengthened the country at the price of weakening Americans as a people. The public experienced deep aspirations and anxieties over these changes. This milieu fed the powerful ideas of the frontier myth, and with some less than subtle direction from their on-the-spot frontier president, Americans endeavored to work through these tensions in an era of rapid change.

As has been observed, long before Theodore Roosevelt reached the presidency, he had been praising frontiersmen and pioneers who spread American institutions and the spirit of freedom. TR himself had become revered for his cowboy image. Just weeks before McKinley’s assassination, the message he drilled into a crowd in Colorado Springs was the same as he would deliver across the country as Commander in Chief. America’s frontier pioneers were, he said, “at once the strongest and most liberty-loving among all the people who had been thrust out into new continents.” He insisted that every American had an obligation in both their public and private lives to serve the principles of the pioneers, including loyalty to the United States, bravery, toughness, responsibility, freedom, integrity, and fairness. These spirited traits of the frontier West, Roosevelt contended, were the prescription for the success of any nation.[27] Using the bully pulpit of the presidency, Roosevelt would put this philosophy to action on a broad scale. It was an inclusive message of American exceptionalism and hope, steeped in the frontier myth that rang true in the minds of millions of Americans of his day and would be used again more than half a century later, for different purposes, by fellow frontier progressive Lyndon Johnson.

John Morton Blum has observed that almost from the moment he took office, “Roosevelt yearned to grapple, as no president yet had, with the whole complex political and social agenda of modern industrial society.”[28] Approaching the presidency with the same kind of whoop and enthusiasm he had shown in the Badlands, Roosevelt used the precepts of the frontier myth to support his expansion of the presidency and to take on responsibilities that his recent predecessors had not even imagined. TR also kept his mind open on domestic issues most of the time and had the rare ability to grasp and stay ahead of where the nation was moving: positioning himself just a little out in front and pulling the American public along with him. Roosevelt accepted massive corporations as a fact of early-twentieth-century life but also consistently championed the rights of ordinary Americans against the “Powers That Prey” and their corporate wealth.[29] With a deeper understanding of the wider world than that possessed by most of his contemporaries, some of his most important presidential positions on foreign policy would likewise, arguably, prove ahead of their time. In particular, Roosevelt’s way of thinking about the US role in world affairs—including its new role as an active power, the need for a close Anglo-American alliance, and use of credible deterrent power—would become what amounted to the conventional wisdom in the mid-twentieth century.

TR’S BIG-STICK PHILOSOPHY ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

Roosevelt’s presidency was a kind of watershed when the frontier myth and presidential politics became inescapably intertwined. While assistant secretary of the navy in the 1890s, Roosevelt had pushed hard for naval expansion and a greater role for the United States in the western hemisphere. After he became president these visions came to fruition, most notably the strengthening of the navy, securing of the right to build the Panama Canal, successful containment of the Germans and Japanese, and American hegemony in the Caribbean.

TR’s great respect for the skills of the frontiersman and citizen-soldier tradition, which he believed came directly out of Americans’ experience out west, encouraged Roosevelt to reorganize and modernize the military. Relatedly, in his view, perceived evil aggression and insult could only be overcome through strength, courage, and preparedness. TR liked to tell the American public that whether on the hunt or alone on the frontier, he had ensured that he was always well armed in the event of trouble. Similarly Roosevelt expected that the United States should be able to defend itself and protect its interests in the sometimes dangerous frontier of international politics. In explaining his “speak softly and carry a big stick” philosophy (based on an old African proverb), TR recalled his experiences in law enforcement in North Dakota. In one example, Roosevelt explained, “Years ago I served as a deputy sheriff in the cattle country. Of course I prepared in advance for my job. I carried what was then the best type of revolver, a.45 self-cocker. I was instructed never to use it unless it was absolutely necessary to do so, and I obeyed instructions. But if in the interest of ‘peace’ it had been proposed to arm me only with a.22 revolver, I would promptly have resigned my job.”[30] TR frequently drew such lessons from and analogies between his days on the frontier and projected these into his future vision for international affairs: an approach that had considerable impact in an era when his fellow Americans looked to the old frontier for guidance.

Before, during, and after his presidency, Roosevelt often asked his fellow Americans to ask themselves, essentially, what would Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett have done? In his writings, TR wanted to revive a frontier spirit both at home and in foreign relations and wrote himself into the ranks of legendary frontier heroes—all seasoned in the West. His frontier stories were intended to energize modern life, politics, and civilization, which TR fully embraced. Roosevelt wrote in the fifth volume of his Winning of the West series that those who denied this need for preparedness were “either so ignorant or of such lukewarm patriotism that they do not wish to see the United States prepared for war.”[31] Again readers were asked to ponder how a mountain man or frontiersman would have fared in their ongoing life-and-death challenges if they too had been similarly unprepared. The Roosevelt administration’s big-stick philosophy, along with its head ranchman’s own western frontier dictum—“Don’t draw unless you mean to shoot”—permeated many aspects of US foreign policy. Roosevelt believed that his experience in the West had taught him how his nation should behave in the international arena and used the myth to promote his foreign policy agenda in response to events of his day. Significantly, as historian H. W. Brands contended, “For all his strenuous life, glory-of-war language, Roosevelt as president conspicuously skirted such opportunities for war as they presented themselves. He fully understood the difference between carrying a big stick and having to use it.”[32] And as I discuss in later chapters, TR’s approach to world affairs both shaped and was shaped by a liberal and inclusive frontier myth structure that some of his presidential successors would employ.

ROOSEVELT’S FORWARD-LOOKING AND STRATEGIC COWBOY DIPLOMACY

Roosevelt went global with his big stick and gospel of strenuosity when he pushed aggressively for the construction of the Panama Canal in 1903. For a leader so sensitive to the role of naval power and its impact on foreign relations, nothing to his mind could be more important than the linking of the Atlantic to the Pacific—which allowed the American fleet to pass quickly from one coast of the United States to the other. Roosevelt was convinced that “if we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.”[33] TR was determined not to allow strategic places in the world to fall into the hands of powers that might undermine American interests. Brands contended that, for these reasons, TR kept a close rein on the Hawaiian Islands, where Japan might be the challenger, and the Caribbean, where Germany was viewed as meddling in the affairs of the western hemisphere. But while Roosevelt advanced important goals in American foreign policy, and at times aggressively so, he was not an advocate of an empire for the sake of having one: apart from some key naval bases and supply stations, as president he had no ambitions for acquiring territory and was even less interested in managing the affairs of others. As commander in chief, he revealed a side of his personality that would prove indispensable to America’s respect and reputation abroad: caution and tact.

Roosevelt’s levelheadedness and inclination to look forward to future frontiers helped make him an outstanding strategic thinker with a knack for predicting a number of world upheavals that would occur both during his lifetime and decades after his death. Roosevelt thought deep and hard about strategic affairs. The president’s personal efforts on behalf of security and world peace and his innovative commitment to the idea of a balance of power in the world—something he had advocated during his lawman days out west—provided a model that his executive office successors would rely on heavily following World War II. As president, Roosevelt kept America out of war and helped prevent tensions between other nations from escalating into war. As he told one of his closest friends, British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice, “We must trust in the Lord and keep our powder dry and our eyes open.”[34] For TR, the best way to stay out of war was to remain well prepared for it. By the end of his presidency, the United States had moved up the ladder from the world’s fifth to the second most powerful naval nation—second only to Great Britain.[35] From 1907 to 1909, the successful and pioneering circumnavigation of the globe by the “Great White Fleet”—sixteen US Navy battleships dispatched to make friendly visits to numerous countries while also showcasing American naval power—was considered by Roosevelt himself to be his most important contribution to world peace. TR’s views in foreign policy, as in domestic affairs, continued to evolve throughout his lifetime as did the frontier myth: he was a man of the twentieth century who took lessons from the frontier past about toughness, and a moral obligation to stop unnecessary wars that did not involve American national interests. Roosevelt looked not only to his past experiences out west but to new frontiers—believing that American ingenuity and spirit would help propel his nation to world leadership status in the century ahead. And he greatly benefited (for the most part) from the fact that his cowboy-hero persona, sometimes consciously and other times not, helped to achieve his goals along the way.

TR’s Rough Rider image was a potent national and international symbol. When Roosevelt visited the ongoing works at the Panama Canal project in November 1906, his own celebrity status as a western hero was celebrated in Panama City, where he was welcomed by “great throngs of people and was escorted to the cathedral steps by a specially organized squad of ‘Panamanian Rough Riders,’ clothed in Rough Rider uniform and mounted upon prancing horses.” The most famous photo of Roosevelt in Panama, on what was the first foreign trip ever taken by a sitting president, showed him having substituted his horse with one of the giant steam shovels at work digging out the Culebra Cut. TR sits as calmly at the controls as he would in the saddle, surveying the work around him. The construction of the canal, as Michael T. Brown has asserted, “marked the triumph of [specifically American] industrial technology over the chaos of the tropics” as “new technological icons emerged that glorified the power of engineering, and Roosevelt was a key part of the process.”[36]

Theodore Roosevelt’s personal fascination with and embrace of new technologies became an integral part of his frontier persona and outlook as well. He was the first president to embrace numerous groundbreaking inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included, among other things, putting in an appearance in front of motion picture cameras whenever he was given the opportunity, being submerged in a naval submarine, and taking to the air without any protective gear in a modified version of the Wright brothers’ Flyer. TR was seen by the public as opening up new frontiers for the century ahead. This conflation of the western myth and intellectual frontiers—joining the past to the future—developed into a peculiar and prominent feature of the twentieth-century frontier myth that carried on through the age of space flight. TR was repeatedly portrayed through the motion picture camera itself as an adventurous pioneer type who did dangerous things as he led the nation in conquering new challenges in the air and sea. Roosevelt and the frontier myth now came to be closely identified not only with earlier generations out west but with innovation and new technologies. Frontier imagery, in this sense, could be compared to the rapid pace of change, and Roosevelt could commend Americans for their role in shaping that change and the nation’s destiny. In the field of foreign relations, TR liked to identify “the two great feats” of America’s technology over the period of his presidency: the sending of the Great White Fleet of American battleships around the world on its “peace mission” and the successful digging of the Panama Canal. Both deeds of the nation, Roosevelt wrote in The Outlook in 1910, had been made possible by a combination of new knowledge and training combined with the “old virtues.” Indeed, TR wrote, “The need for the special and distinctive pioneer virtues is as great as ever.”[37] These virtues included many of the same ones that Turner had identified years before, along with a new one: the steady determination to “work for the common good, for the advancement of mankind.”[38]

At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Franklin K. Lane, US secretary of the interior, spoke at the opening of the festivities and made specific this Roosevelt connection between national history and the triumph of technology. Lane celebrated the tremendous task of literally moving mountains to build the canal that allowed America to control the seas. Looking forward to the decades ahead he declared that while this frontier adventure may have closed, the spirit of “the sons of the pioneers” would live on: “The long journey of this light figure of the pioneer is at an end,” Lane told the large crowd, “the waste places of earth have been found and filled, but the adventure is not at an end; the greatest adventure before us, the gigantic adventures of advancing democracy—strong, virile, kindly—and in that advance we shall be the true indestructible spirit of the American pioneer.”[39] The pioneer had thus fulfilled his destiny of settling the frontier west and connecting the continent—but the mission continued, for as Michael T. Brown observed, “The spirit of the iconic figure of the pioneer remains, put to use in the ongoing expansion of a powerful nation.”[40] These events related to modernization and technical prowess were thus mutually informing. During Roosevelt’s era and in keeping with the contentions of anthropologist Sahlins, they served to strengthen a frontier myth as images of the past and hopes for the future reinforced one another.

Significantly, in Roosevelt’s day (and as already suggested), more references were still being made to frontiersmen and pioneers than to the more recent late-nineteenth-century western cowboy hero. Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and those frontiersmen and tough pioneers who were said to have wrested American civilization out of a savage wilderness remained the most talked about of the frontier heroes across the country. For Roosevelt and his fellow Americans at the outset of the twentieth century, the frontier was not only limited to the West of the late nineteenth century but also included the frontiersmen, mountain men, and pioneers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the East, Midwest, Southwest, and Far West. But as the cowboy and gunfighter imagery springboarded by president-historian Roosevelt, author Wister, artist Frederic Remington, and showman Buffalo Bill Cody took hold, it expanded into an enormous “western” industry during the early to mid-twentieth century. As a result, it was this cowboy hero west of the Mississippi who would take center stage and help shape the content and expression of presidential foreign and domestic policies.

From 1901 to 1909, the main elements of the thinking behind Roosevelt’s style of foreign policy not only included security interests but moral obligations—more precisely, the myth’s philosophy of exceptionalism. TR, like most of his fellow Americans, believed in his heart that other peoples of the world could not really improve their lot unless they attempted to copy the United States. Historian Norman Graebner commented that “Manifest Destiny left a heritage that continued into the twentieth century in the form of American Exceptionalism—a belief that the country had a superior virtue and obligation to correct the world’s ills.”[41] But TR’s application of this principle differed from other presidents who preceded and immediately succeeded him. Roosevelt had a coherent overall strategy to select those areas of the world of vital interest to the United States (including the western hemisphere, the Pacific, and allied nations in Europe) and focused his attentions there—not everywhere that seemed to be threatened. In retrospect, Roosevelt’s vision for America’s extended frontier, his overall strategic plan, was arguably decades ahead of its time. And as we shall see in later chapters of this study, his successors in the 1940s through the 1960s would rely increasingly on the frontier myth to garner spiritual and material support for this vision.

THE REASONABLE COWBOY

The hawkish view of Roosevelt as president, popular among historians, stems from his substantive buildup and modernization of the American military, his interventionism in the Caribbean and Central America, and his plethora of public pronouncements about national strength and the need for using America’s new great-power status to influence global affairs. But like a few political cartoonists of his day (see L. C. Gregg’s 1904 cartoon opposite), some scholars of diplomacy have had a tendency to overplay TR’s role as a warrior, especially in the years following his Rough Rider days. Thomas Bailey, for example, characterized Roosevelt as “an apostle of Mars” in his classic, A Diplomatic History of the American People.[42] On occasion while in the White House, TR would show flashes of his loud and bullying rhetoric—but for the most part, this study contends that he displayed rare talent for complex and sophisticated strategic thought and devoted much of his energy toward maintaining the peace. The American public, after all, was benefiting substantially from the status quo of the early twentieth century. At the same time they recognized their nation’s new role as a leading player in world affairs. In this milieu, TR established a kind of model and plan for future presidents that confirmed America’s coming of age in the foreign policy arena.

The frontier myth of Roosevelt’s presidential years was a forward-looking phenomenon, and as the nation’s number-one personification of this myth, TR concurrently was a future-leaning, twentieth-century man. Although his enthusiasm for foreign ventures and imperialism waned after he entered the White House, President TR, in keeping with the emerging liberal myth of his day, still showed a strong willingness to commit resources and deploy government influence against perceived threats and in support of vital interests—including those within the United States (such as corporate corruption) and from outside. In the area of foreign affairs, he would now rely not only on military muscle but on a judicious blending with informed and strategic diplomacy.

The liberal frontier myth and Roosevelt’s promotion and pursuit of internationalism were in direct contrast to that of his political opponents in the more reactionary Democratic Party of William Jennings Bryan and the later, conservative GOP of the 1930s and early 1940s—which by then had reoriented itself as the party of isolationism. Theodore Rex’s active involvement in international affairs (a policy later revived by the failure of appeasement in Europe and the outbreak of World War II), creation of a credible deterrent power, and efforts to solidify an Anglo-American alliance all became key foundations of American foreign policy from 1945 onward.

“For President!” TR as fanatic militarist, a view held over largely from his prepresidential years. (Lewis Crumley Gregg, Atlanta Constitution, 1904)

TR’s Great White Fleet of 1907–9 as “President Roosevelt’s Idea of the Dove of Peace” (W. C. Morris, Spokane [WA] Spokesman-Review, January 19, 1907). According to TR, every nation had accepted the cruise of the American battle fleet around the world as “proof that we were not only desirous ourselves to keep peace, but able to prevent the peace being broken at our expense.”

Today, the phrase “cowboy diplomacy” has taken on connotations of international bullying and recklessness, but in his day, Roosevelt’s style of diplomacy was much more sophisticated and diversified. Brands argued persuasively that Roosevelt has to be ranked at the top of US presidents as a strategic thinker.[43] Perhaps the exercise of power had a softening influence on Roosevelt. Having purged himself of the need to prove his manhood after the stint with the Rough Riders in Cuba, TR as president seemed much less prone to speaking the language of a warmonger. Roosevelt was far more reflective and cautious when he spoke for the United States as its president than when he spoke merely for himself. As contended earlier in this chapter, he carried a big stick but usually spoke softly as a reasonable cowboy who preferred not to use force unless American interests were seen as directly threatened.[44] TR, the former ardent imperialist, now turned his attention to building up a strong defense at home and dropped the idea of further expansion. By 1907 he even came to believe that the United States would be better off getting out of the Philippines (America’s “heel of Achilles” in Roosevelt’s thinking) and that its annexation had been a mistake.[45] Three years later he called for the creation of a League of Peace. Like the best of the twentieth century’s cowboy heroes, TR had an impressive range of personal skills and tools at his disposal to achieve his nation’s objectives and to get the job done.

Perhaps the best-known example of the cautious Roosevelt was his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, for which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1906. This peacemaker role for Roosevelt seems especially significant as it provides a window into his wider thinking by the time he had entered the presidency. To prevent the Japanese from becoming too powerful and to keep some semblance of a balance of power in Northeast Asia, TR made use of the presidency to act as a mediator between Japan and Russia. It was tricky business, for as he told his son Kermit, “I am having my hair turned gray by dealing with the Russian and Japanese peace negotiators. The Japanese ask too much . . . but the Russians are ten times worse than the Japs because they are so stupid and won’t tell the truth.” Eventually, though, he convinced the Russians to face reality and the Japanese to tame their demands. The resulting Treaty of Portsmouth kept Japanese expansion in check without requiring the use of American gunplay and won Roosevelt international recognition as a reasonable, even peacemaking cowboy. Increasingly the frontier myth was establishing itself in the world of foreign relations as a phenomenon where a cowboy president could use his diplomatic skills to rope in international “yahoos” and was not limited to employing his shotgun or revolver.[46] In a similar vein to his domestic policies, the maturing TR was willing to listen and to make an effort to understand others across their cultural and political differences: to explore new frontiers in the arena of ideas. As the first American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, he also helped the United States gain greater respect and leverage among foreign nations.

THE FRONTIERS OF RACE, GENDER, AND INCLUSIVENESS

Richard White, Patricia Limerick, and the “New West” historians have chastised both Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner as the foremost proponents of Anglo-American settlement on the continent. Both men, in Limerick’s words, believed that the frontier was “where white people got scarce, or alternatively, where white people got scared.”[47] These New West historians, writes Brinkley, contend that Roosevelt treated Native tribes, Spanish settlers, and even French Canadians as “riffraff who needed to be cleared away like so many weeds.”[48] Anglo-Saxon frontiersmen, on the other hand, could seemingly do no wrong. At best, they assert, the Natives in The Winning of the West were portrayed as noble savages. White, Limerick, and company are correct to point out that Roosevelt’s early ethnocentrism was a widely accepted aspect of the late-nineteenth-century social Darwinism. Some of his narrowness was no doubt part of a larger American response to the greater number of immigrants from an increasingly mixed array of ethnic groups who came into the country in the 1880s and 1890s. But as Kathleen Dalton’s excellent study has convincingly argued, as years passed TR took on a more liberal and compassionate view toward race, class, and gender issues than the New West historians have acknowledged. Dalton and other scholars, such as Elliot West, have brought perspective to the studies of TR.[49] Over time, an array of his youthful prejudices faded and even disappeared, and Roosevelt’s ideas about other demographic groups became more complex and mature.

TR’s attitudes about race were flexible and evolved into much more sympathetic and inclusive views with each passing decade. As Thomas G. Dyer explained in his comprehensive study, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, by the early twentieth century, the learned president now insisted “that if he were to rewrite his histories he would use neither the terms Scotch-Irish nor Anglo-Saxon” as he had done frequently in The Winning of the West.[50] TR was also “very doubtful” that such thing as an “Aryan” race had ever existed.[51] Though he had once viewed blacks as hopelessly inferior and supported some immigration restriction gimmicks, later in life the tenets of scientific racism made him ill.[52]

By the time he had become president, Roosevelt was much more interested in fully integrating Native Americans, African Americans, and other minorities into the fabric of national life than in armchair eugenics. His own account of the Rough Riders, a founding document that helped shape and was shaped by turn-of-the-century frontier myth, is in large part the story of how a group of individuals overcame their wide-ranging differences to work together as one united unit with a similar purpose: to liberate the persecuted Cubans. And these Riders, he pointed out, were made up of whites, blacks, American Indians, cowboys, farmers, and soldiers from all regions of the country. TR showered praise on Native American members of the Rough Riders and stated (though very paternalistically) that some Native communities were now worthy of “absolute equality with our citizens of white blood.”[53] No longer viewed as a threat or obstacle to progress, Roosevelt wanted to welcome and embrace Native Americans as part of the broader mix of the American nation—provided it was on terms that he perceived would strengthen rather than weaken national unity. Meanwhile, TR’s well-known invitation of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, for dinner in 1904 had made him the first president to entertain a black man in the White House. Roosevelt claimed that he did not know any single white southerner who was as decent a man as his friend Washington. TR also appointed several accomplished blacks to substantive federal offices. Many white southerners were livid, viewing these actions and associations as a direct challenge to Jim Crow. One South Carolina appointment that sparked considerable controversy prompted Roosevelt to reply in his correspondence, “I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.”[54]

Roosevelt did not completely escape the racism of his times, though, and measured by today’s terms stumbled badly at least twice in his presidential and postpresidential years. On one occasion in 1906, TR ordered that all the men of a black regiment be discharged without trial after a white bartender was killed in an allegedly wild midnight raid in Brownsville, Texas. Then, six years later and for reasons of political expediency, he relented to southern delegates’ insistence that black delegates should not be seated at the lily-white 1912 Progressive Party convention. TR’s critics were given plenty of ammunition here and used it with some effectiveness.

But despite these two inconsistencies, Roosevelt was not the one-dimensional, bombastic racist that some New West scholars have portrayed. As president, TR’s views fit closely with those of his friend Booker T. Washington. Historian John Gable explained that “‘Roosevelt did not think that any race was inherently or biologically inferior to any other. But he was anthropologically and philosophically provincial in his views of culture and ‘civilization.’”[55] At odds with his three close friends Henry Cabot Lodge, Owen Wister, and Frederic Remington—who each longed for a purely Anglo-Saxon nation—TR came to celebrate hybridity among race, especially between Native Americans and whites. As president, he asserted that individuals needed to be judged on their abilities and nothing else, preached broad-mindedness, and encouraged Americans to put away their regional differences. The maturing Roosevelt came to possess a deep and abiding faith in the power of simply living in America to break down all racial and ethnic barriers and to produce a kind of common American identity. Roosevelt moved about as far away from the racism of his day as one could and helped carry the increasingly liberal frontier myth with him: embracing the idea of the melting pot years before Israel Zangwill even coined the phrase for his 1912 play, which was aptly dedicated to TR.

Roosevelt’s thoughts on race and on the need for a unified nation based on the frontier virtues were revealed vividly in his speeches and correspondence. Conservationist and Aryan supremacist Madison Grant, with whom Theodore Roosevelt corresponded for many years, once wrote to TR about a man who claimed he could demonstrate with evidence that men from white, old-stock American units of New England and the South fought better than other races in World War I. Blacks and the “lower races,” Grant reported, “cannot stand the strain of the war.”[56] But Roosevelt would have none of this and called that man “an addlepated ass and the alternative is worse.” TR responded that one’s ethnicity made no difference since men of foreign backgrounds from around the country, including Jews, fought well. Region was also irrelevant to Roosevelt: “I don’t for one moment believe that they are better than the men from the western and middle Pacific Coast States. They are all fine.” For TR, regardless of race or region, all Americans who had a spark of Galahad or of the frontiersman did their part in the war, fighting against the “unendurable” trait of “race prejudice” found among their German enemies.[57]

Roosevelt had once bought fully into the late-nineteenth-century racism that in time would spawn a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. But TR, like some of his other fellow countrymen and women, had seen the patriotic support of blacks with the Rough Riders in Cuba and later in World War I, which appears to have enabled him to accept racial equality and repudiate racists like Madison Grant. His initially harsh descriptions of Native Americans had softened during his presidential years as well. According to Dyer, this was all part of TR’s “growing sense of social justice and reform.”[58] Again, Roosevelt seemed to be able to see beyond the bigotry of his own time, and major events, the world wars in particular, helped broaden the parameters of the national frontier myth itself, making it generally more inclusive. Further, one’s character, rather than race, made that person a success or failure in the wilderness and in modern American life. By the time of his presidency, Roosevelt sought to pull the nation together, and though he was not, even with the changing parameters of the myth, able to overcome the barriers to judging individuals based on merit, he did strongly deliver a new message at the dawn of the twentieth century that inclusion and equality were key cornerstones of national unity. In the quest for a unique and uniform American culture, based on the equalizing frontier experience, Roosevelt utterly rejected ethnic “hyphenation.”[59] One could even argue that the integrationist dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. and future frontier president Lyndon Baines Johnson grew out of the same source of civic nationalism that TR and others were advocating at the outset of the twentieth century.

Race and region were not the only inclusiveness issues to engage Roosevelt. On the issue of gender politics, TR was the first prominent male political figure to openly endorse nationwide women’s suffrage and called for a minimum wage for women. Though he had tended to avoid the suffrage question during his presidency, in 1912 he waded into the issue and, in his autobiography published the following year, referred to himself as a “zealous supporter” of women’s suffrage. But how could this symbol of frontier masculinity help lead the charge for women’s rights? Historian Arnaldo Testi contended that TR’s deference to women’s politics and social reform was possible not despite his cowboy machismo but because of it: no one could accuse Rough Rider and ranchman Roosevelt of being an effeminate reformer.[60]

TR’s own enlightenment on women’s rights apparently began as far back as his Harvard days in 1880, when he chose an unusual topic for a senior essay: “The Practicability of Equalizing Men and Women before the Law.”[61] In the abstract sense, Roosevelt expressed no doubt “that women should have the equal rights with men” and called for inheritance rights, “’the most absolute equality’” in marriage; moreover, he declared—right there in the nineteenth century—that “I do not think the woman should assume the man’s name.”[62] In the years that followed, Roosevelt also challenged tradition by placing women into active roles in his Winning of the West. Unlike other writers of the period, who relegated women to roles that supplemented the male pioneers, TR saw women as essential participants in the frontier experience: rugged individualists who fulfilled their civic duty to birth and rear the children of a mighty nation. For Roosevelt, the frontier adventures of the pioneers provided evidence that women could be as strong and moral—demonstrating the “same iron temper”[63]—as the men. As Leroy Dorsey has pointed out, women who rose physically to “manly challenges” were a staple feature of TR’s frontier stories.[64] For Roosevelt, life in the mythic wilderness featured women who performed the roles of childbearer and mother, but also of hero, who, when called upon, could battle Indians or dispense justice—especially when her husband was away or had been killed or injured. In his “Sixth Annual Message, 1906,” the president implored modern women to work toward advancing the nation’s goals just as those on the frontier had done, in equal step with the men.[65] Women, in Roosevelt’s thinking, had already demonstrated their central role in the nation’s purpose, so denying them equality in the twentieth century made no sense. In a kind of blending of Victorian principles with the modern age, TR positioned himself between mainstream views on feminism and women’s activists of his times: advocating for far more equality in return for the mother function—and, all along, TR addressed the identity of women within the context of the frontier myth.

THE WILDERNESS CULT: CONSERVATION POLICY AND THE POWER OF THE CHANGING FRONTIER MYTH

Coinciding but not coincidental to Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, a wilderness movement emerged in the early twentieth century as a celebration of wilderness and the frontier. This cultlike phenomenon grew in opposition to the material occupation of an increasingly regimented and industrialized society. For the first time, the idea of a vanishing, unspoiled wilderness was looked upon with regret by a wide range of Americans. The “wilderness cult” was inspired by John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and others who were committed to protecting the wilderness and promoting those frontier values that its members believed gave America its unique qualities.[66] Muir, an original founder of the Sierra Club, acted as a kind of publicizer, a person who echoed the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and in the changing context of the times was able to articulate and promote them with an enthusiasm that drew widespread attention. Even Owen Wister got in on the act. In The Virginian, the narrator reveals that he was sickened by the piles of trash that littered the western frontier, describing “the empty sardine box . . . rusting over the face of the Western earth” and the “thick heaps and fringes of tin cans, and shelving mounds of bottles cast out of the saloons” on “the ramparts of Medicine Bow.”[67] President Roosevelt’s belief that contact with the wilderness would help the country rid itself of “flabbiness” and “slothful ease” was also influential.[68] Roderick Nash observed in Wilderness and the American Mind that enthusiasm for the wilderness ironically began in the cities, not in the wilds, and that this appreciation increased as the nation’s pioneer past receded and came to rely on it less—with the wilderness cult emerging just as Turner lamented that the frontier was vanishing.[69]

In The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, Brinkley contended that both the changing values of the times and Theodore Roosevelt’s exposure to natural wonders in his early life shaped his environmental values and policies as president. Changes in values at the turn of the twentieth century brought about changes in thinking about the frontier that would again directly and substantively influence presidential policy decisions. While in office, TR set aside five times more land to create federal parks than all of his presidential predecessors combined: establishing the first five national parks, eighteen national monuments, one hundred and fifty national forests, fifty-one wildlife refuges, eighteen national monuments, four national game preserves, and twenty-one national federal reclamation projects. During Roosevelt’s years in office, US forest reserves shot up from about 43 million to 194 million acres: an area larger than the combined land mass of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In total, TR protected approximately 230 million acres of public land.[70] Centralization of national resources into the hands of the national government, rather than business and private interests, was key to this process. All along Roosevelt—with some irony, given his well-known hunting exploits—cast the frontiersman as one who used the environment wisely. TR emphasized a frontier myth where its finite nature was tied directly to economic opportunity while tending to deemphasize its value for business interests in favor of its spiritual value. Conservation of the remaining American wilderness frontier did more than just help secure the nation’s economic future: it provided the opportunity for regenerating the American spirit.

As president, TR not only perpetuated the myths and symbols of the frontier myth, he helped adjust and reshape the emphasis of those myths as well. As a rancher, he had foreseen the risks of overgrazing while also developing a strong desire to protect public lands for the benefit of everyone rather than only the privileged classes. Now the frontier would not merely be a source of wealth but become a key means for achieving wilderness conservation. As William Cronon observed, “In the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilderness preservation in the United States, for if the wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its last remnants as monuments to the American past—and as an insurance policy to protect its future.”[71] By the dawn of the twentieth century, the wild frontier out west was becoming increasingly appreciated not only for its resource value but as a scarce site of national identity formation. After all, for Roosevelt, Turner, and other promoters of the myth, the frontier process had been the crucial experience enabling Americans to forge their unique, democratic national identity. The rapid urbanization and industrialization of the United States appeared to them and to millions of Americans to threaten all of this. The country could only maintain its manliness, vigor, and strength by helping preserve those spaces where the national story could be realized.

Fittingly, then, in his first annual presidential message to Congress in December 1901, TR clearly set out his conservation agenda with an emphasis on its democratic incentives. “The forest reserves should be set apart forever,” Roosevelt declared, “for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the shortsighted greed of a few.”[72] Conserving nature and making it available to all citizens for rest and recreation was not only vital because it provided them a break from the anxieties of the urban, industrial life but also because by implication it strengthened democracy. Valuing the wilderness as the nation’s main source of masculine vigor and democratic fortification made its preservation a matter of national health. As a result, TR’s version of the myth dictated that it was vital to provide all classes of Americans space to experience the frontier. The Boone and Crockett Club had been part of this effort to save wilderness so that the frontier myth could be perpetuated and new stories of frontier adventure told. Now Roosevelt wanted to broaden this opportunity to all Americans regardless of class.

With the successful implementation of the Antiquities Act (1906) in his second term Roosevelt became more proactive and more dangerous than ever to western developers, oil interests, and railroad companies. The first “green” president even used his attire to deploy America’s most powerful myth in the service of wilderness protection. Brinkley describes how TR typically wore a Stetson with a bandana around his neck, and filled his public speeches with cowboy talk, Indian words, and western place names seldom heard in the East. Using his bully pulpit in Washington, he cast himself as a Rocky Mountain westerner to help promote his radical conservationism. His western symbolism was intended to represent not only a region but the entire nation. After all, America had initially been all frontier, which, so went the implication, had provided for a unique American past and national identity. Powerful business interests who saw these ideas as a direct threat to their own profits, along with political allies of the timber industry, became enraged at the cowboy TR. Republican senator Charles Fulton of Oregon and others in Congress believed the entire Antiquities Act was nonsense and were fed up with executive orders that gave priority to spotted owls and petrified wood over corporate profit. But their anger only emboldened Roosevelt. On March 2, 1907, TR created thirty-two new forest reserves overnight, catching Congress off guard and delivering a devastating counterthrust to those promoting states’ rights. It was perhaps the boldest example of Roosevelt’s “unappeasable conservationism.”[73] According to Fulton, TR and Gifford Pinchot had sneakily withdrawn sixteen million acres. “Why didn’t Roosevelt burn the Constitution while he was at it?,” some business interests asked.[74] But TR later boasted about his success in An Autobiography: “The opponents of the Forest Reserve turned handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive: but the threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action.”[75]

Just before leaving office in 1909, Roosevelt once again described the need to adhere to frontier conservation. He told a joint session of Congress that “it is irrefutable proof that the conservation of our resources is the fundamental question before this Nation, and that our first and greatest task is to set our house in order and to begin to live within our means.” Roosevelt added that he urged, “where the facts are known, where the public interest is clear, that neither indifference and inertia, nor adverse private interests, shall be allowed to stand in the way of the public good. . . . It is high time to realize that our responsibility to the coming millions is like that of parents to their children, and that in wasting our resources we are wronging our descendants.”[76] The American frontier was not the limitless bonanza that some corporate interests had claimed: now conservation would be necessary to allow America’s uniqueness, its exceptionalism, to be maintained long into the future. These areas, he said, would also serve as a refuge from the problems of tyranny and corruption caused by those same individuals who wanted America’s sacred places exploited in the service of profit and greed. Americans had overcome the deadly challenges of the frontier experience but now needed to protect those same untamed wilds out west so that they could maintain the frontier edge required to meet and conquer any problem or challenge that faced the nation far into the future.

President Roosevelt and John Muir—two frontier heroes—perched on the edge of a cliff at Yosemite Valley in commemoration of their much talked-about camping trip in May 1903. The confident TR, in his riding boots, looks as if he might be reaching for a weapon while the shrewd Muir looks off to the side with his hands positioned humbly behind his back. (Underwood and Underwood, Accession Number: #LC-USZC4–4698, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

As in so many other aspects of his presidency TR was operating on the precepts of a forward-thinking frontier myth. In this way, Roosevelt had laid the foundation for LBJ’s New Conservationism program of the 1960s and promoted the idea of sustainability almost a century before the idea came into fashion during the Bill Clinton administration. TR was essentially pursuing an agenda of closing much of the western frontier to settlement and development, and he wanted tough laws to throw poachers and the like in the slammer.

But scholars and pundits have often pointed out a glaring irony in all of this too. Until his death, TR, like some of his hunting sports–minded contemporaries, could not seem to match up his understanding of the need to respect and protect nature from greedy business interests with his own personal drive to kill it as a hunter. During some African safaris later in his life, Roosevelt killed thousands of animals. The hunter was part of the old frontier mythology that forever remained key to Roosevelt’s self-image as a self-reliant and masculine individual. TR’s detractors, particularly William Randolph Hearst, delighted in this fact so much that his papers released dozens of political cartoons pointing out the paradox of Roosevelt’s excesses; these barbs even became the basis of a comedy motion picture titled Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King (1901).[77] But most Americans continued to like this image, and Roosevelt himself continued to publish stories of his hunting exploits.

The frontier myth in its early manifestations contained both conservationist and resource exploitation elements. The myth was flexible and existed on a spectrum. As events challenged its structure, the myth could still subsume these activities, but at other times the myth’s structures themselves were forced to change and adapt. Over time a growing acknowledgment among the president and the American public that the overexploitation of western lands and frontier resources could rob future generations of their unique, national heritage caused changes in key aspects of the frontier myth’s structure. But during Roosevelt’s time, substantive conservation policies and government intervention to protect wild lands initiated by Roosevelt’s administration—and on a personal level, Roosevelt’s participation in events that only seemed to degrade these spaces (including his own hunting expeditions)—continued to exist side by side and to be underscored by a frontier myth that still saw merit and explanations for protecting the vanishing wilderness and the manly, character-building activities of the hunt. The seeming dichotomy would not disappear anytime soon either—as we shall observe upon encountering our second liberal cowboy president, LBJ.

“The Roosevelt Big Game Specimens Sent to the Smithsonian Institution.” The results of Roosevelt’s African trip, 1909–10, with the initials “TR” painted on every piece, sometimes twice. (Photograph by Paul Thompson, New York, c. 1910)

THE SQUARE DEAL AND SENSE OF COMMUNITY

The frontier myth, changes to American society, and Roosevelt’s own experiences out west had instilled in the president a determined faith in progress, a preference for a strong federal government over a laissez-faire sectional one as protector of national interests and the poor and downtrodden, and a view of the need to balance out individualism with a broader communal awareness and concern. The myths of the Old West had arisen in American society partly as a response to massive industrialization and concentrations of wealth that Roosevelt and millions of other Americans viewed as having emboldened the forces of evil in the world. By the late nineteenth century, an increasing number of Americans—including a rapidly growing middle class—were rejecting the conventional postbellum theory that government should stay out of business and that individuals left to their own discretion would act in the public’s interest. Now there was a growing sense of a vital public interest in its own right and that this interest needed protection from the growing corruption and greed of large corporations. Along with many others, Roosevelt was caught up in these changing ideas about the nation. In The Winning of the West, TR recognized the need for a larger communal concern to rein in rugged individualism. An individual’s success, as Turner had articulated, depended on their self-reliance, a masterful grasp of material things, know-how, and the like; but frontiersman Roosevelt came increasingly to believe that society also needed to provide a more level playing field—or equality of opportunity—by taking away economic obstacles and protecting individuals from others’ gross misconduct and exploitations. By acting collectively through the federal government, American citizens could play a positive role in that evolution and in maintaining a balance of power in society. Merit should be rewarded, but Roosevelt also wanted everyone running the race on fair terms. Cowboy toughness, honesty, courage, energy, and self-reliance would combine with compassion and service to others to create a healthy and vigorous nation. TR, then, came to see individual effort and government control not as mutually exclusive; rather he asserted that a powerful federal government would need to intervene in order for individuals to experience the kind of personal freedom that they could not have if left on their own.

During his first term in office, Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” became the title of his presidential program. Here the president was not just talking about playing fair; he wanted the rules of the game changed. TR would make full use of his bully pulpit to shape the national agenda for change, invigorate the federal government by attracting many of the best and the brightest bureaucrats in the nation, and set up an innovative, action-oriented federal government that would intervene on behalf of individual citizens to defend their interests and promote new rights. In terms of the latter, conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection were highest on TR’s list. This trailblazing by the first of the frontier presidents was all part of his role in creating a modern presidency that would reshape the landscape of US politics and government.

When Roosevelt received news of his victory on election night in 1904, he was reported to have said, “Tomorrow I shall come into my office in my own right. Then watch out for me.”[78] Encouraged by his big victory, Roosevelt veered further leftward in his second term. Now he would be able to fully play out his role as the nation’s number-one frontier cowboy, casting himself as lead egalitarian democrat who would challenge the phony and corrupting influences of the eastern robber barons. In addition to conservation, his legislative achievements included regulation of the railroad industry, the Pure Food and Drug Act (first in a series of acts aimed at consumer protection), and a proposed inheritance tax for the wealthy. Through it all Roosevelt maintained his constant preaching against the perils of “materialism” and the lavish “malefactors of great wealth.”[79] For TR, wealthy easterners as a group were much more degenerative and effeminate than those self-reliant but kindhearted, good-neighbor westerners with whom he was proud to live and work. Related to this view, Roosevelt prescribed a formula for the American people based on a sense of moral purpose. “If ever our people become so sordid as to feel that all that counts is moneyed prosperity, ignoble well-being, effortless ease, and comfort,” TR cautioned, “then this nation shall perish, as it will deserve to perish, from the earth.”[80] Roosevelt came with time to reject that attitude of social Darwinists and instead felt that men at the roundup, in battle, or working the fields deserved shorter hours of labor, better housing, and greater opportunities to reach higher levels of existence. What he desired instead was to create a great balance between individualism and collectivism—something he regarded as a fair, timeless solution.

Theodore Roosevelt sought in particular as president to cut down to size the accepted equation of wealth with virtue and the popular blending of the image of the successful businessman with the good and upright citizen. He saw the main problem of his age as the unchecked power of corporate capitalism and wanted to use the federal government to help maintain at least some level of equality of opportunity and fairness in American life.[81] While congressional income tax and inheritance taxes would not be brought in until the decade after TR’s presidency, his hammering at these points began to change Americans’ perceptions of their society and provoked a nationwide debate on the issue of inherited wealth and power in an egalitarian democracy. As such, Roosevelt played a major role in creating the climate that made these changes possible. He was, in fact, the first president to grapple with a question that Americans still struggle with today: What should the relationship be between the federal government and concentrations of business power?

President Roosevelt on horseback leaping a split rail fence (1902). Though TR saw many hurdles to be overcome, he believed that the progressive-frontier dynamic would ultimately carry the day: providing Americans with equality of opportunity based on a balance of power in society. Roosevelt and his supporters viewed this solution as timeless. (Courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-USZ62–11960)

TR’S NEW NATIONALISM

For Roosevelt, being a cowboy out west and governing in the east were the two most exciting businesses on earth. He clearly did not like sitting on the sidelines during his postpresidential years. In keeping with his personal need to maintain a certain level of strenuosity, Roosevelt did and has done more than any other president in the years after he left the White House to have a substantive impact on the direction of US politics and government.

For his times, the progressive Theodore Roosevelt—during his presidency and in the years afterward—grew increasingly liberal, even radical, on issues such as government regulation and intervention, conservation, the distribution of power and wealth, women’s rights, and race relations. These positions became tied in the popular mind to Roosevelt and his cowboy ways, which was not all simply image and perception. As president, TR had already surprised many with his reasonableness at home and, for the most part, restraint abroad. Roosevelt had even become the first American president (not without some irony) to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in negotiations at Sagamore Hill to end the Russo-Japanese War. The first in a line of progressive presidents (which continued especially with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, and ended with fellow cowman LBJ in the 1960s), TR used his cowboy credentials in office and in the decade following to promote greater federal government involvement in social, economic, and foreign policy—helping set the stage for increasingly liberal presidential agendas.

In August 1910 Roosevelt made arguably the most important speech of his career on the subject of the “New Nationalism” at Osawatomie, Kansas. Here he adamantly put national ahead of sectional or regional interests and unbuckled his holster on Republican president William Howard Taft when, quoting from his “great hero” Abraham Lincoln he announced, “Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.”[82] Throwing his lot in with those supporting the eight-hour day, workmen’s compensation laws, and labor’s right to organize, TR told the cheering crowd, “The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.”[83] Placing himself at the head of the liberal movement he insisted that conservation, currency reform, the direct primary, and regulation of child labor were all needed in order to bring about the greater good of “national efficiency” or the “New Nationalism.”[84] The collectivist responsibilities of the broad community, he continued to insist, could assure the increased opportunity for all to realize this full potential. It was a philosophy that placed in the realm of federal law the same kind of principles that TR had been advocating in his publications from his ranching through his postpresidential days in Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, Wilderness Hunter, and African Game Trails, just to name a few. All of these books were intended to instruct readers on the kinds of qualities that would make them better citizens who could both support themselves and the common good: the books also emphasized that success in the hunt often depended on teamwork. For Roosevelt, manly qualities included not only toughness and individualism but also cooperation, hospitality, and camaraderie. As TR had asserted in The Winning of the West, “Colonization was not done by individuals, but by groups of individuals.”[85] Long before his talk of a Square Deal and the New Nationalism, TR informed his fellow Americans that his western experience and profound adherence to the frontier myth had taught him that mutual support can be crucial to individual well-being.

After he was unsuccessful in his bid to capture the Republican Party nomination in 1912 (though he had the more popular appeal, William Howard Taft had the GOP machine behind his reelection bid), TR declared himself “as fit as a bull moose” and led the formation of a third party, the Progressive Party, which attempted to recapture the presidency under that new banner. Before long, the bull moose became his party’s new emblem in the bid for the presidency as TR “called for the creation of a full welfare state by advocating social security insurance to cope with the ‘hazards of sickness, accident, invalidism, involuntary unemployment, and old age.’”[86] Roosevelt thus became the first president or former president to begin the process toward the Medicare Act that LBJ would sign into law in 1965. TR’s new party also pushed for more direct democracy through promoting women’s right to vote, direct primaries, referendums, and the direct election of US senators. Reiterating the same essential philosophy and trajectory established during his presidency, Roosevelt continued to insist that American society, as in frontier society, had a responsibility to ensure that everyone received a fair chance to show his worth and that government’s role was to level American society’s playing field. Too much individualism without any feeling or sense of obligation to the rest of the community was viewed as promoting selfishness and allowing for the exploitation of society’s weaker members.

The frontier theme that had benefited Roosevelt so well in previous campaigns continued to take center stage in 1912. After being struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet in October (TR was likely saved by his thick folded speech and other obstacles that kept the bullet from penetrating farther into his chest), newspapers across the country gave special attention to the immediate reactions of well-known western heroes, and villains. The Baltimore Sun reported, “‘Bat’ Masterson, the former frontiersman, telegraphed [to TR]: ‘The bullet has not yet been molded that can kill a man of your strength of body and character.’ Colonel Roosevelt exclaimed: ‘Bully for you, Bat.’” In Montana, meanwhile, the papers revealed that Frank James, brother of Jesse and a former bad man himself, immediately offered up his services as a member of TR’s bodyguard; front-page headlines read: “James’ Brother Would Be Guard: Relative of Notorious Outlaw Wishes to Accompany Roosevelt in Campaign.” Realizing the potential double-edged political sword of such an arrangement, TR’s campaign staff apparently sidestepped James’s proposal through a carefully worded response.[87]

Since Theodore Roosevelt’s death in 1919, many Americans have lost sight of his leftist, radical side, and his image has sometimes been applied to phony claimants hoping to benefit from Roosevelt’s star power. Ultraconservative Warren G. Harding had labeled TR a communist in 1912 but as president exploited his fellow Republican’s memory to win the White House in 1920; as we shall see, Harding would not be the last presidential hopeful to do so. William Allen White, the Kansas newspaper editor and Progressive movement leader, once declared that had TR been brought back to life in the 1920s and spoken his mind, “The various societies, security leagues, minute men of the republic, and 100 percent Americans would start a whispering campaign that his real name was Feodor Roosevisky and that he was sent here as an agent of the Bolshiveki.” Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior, contended that a TR today might not be too far off of that perception when he told the New York Times, “The truth of the matter is that Roosevelt today would be on the left.”[88]

The frontier myth is not the property of one major political party or the other: both parties have laid claim to the myth during different periods in time. The myth emerged from the social realities and events that preoccupied the country at the turn of the century and was then shaped and deployed through the ideas, words, and actions of its major proponents, of which TR was the number-one political protagonist. It was a vision that drew on a legendary past to create a future that was impervious to regional characteristics and, initially, promoted predominantly liberal policies of inclusiveness and federal government programs of intervention at home and abroad. The Republican National Convention of 1912 was arguably a turning point in terms of party domination of the frontier myth. According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “By rejecting Roosevelt, the Republicans turned their backs on responsible conservatism.”[89] When Roosevelt and the Progressive Republicans bolted the GOP, they left the old guard fully in control. TR had for the most part championed an inclusive party and a program of reform and innovation; these elements now departed the GOP and would eventually take shape, instead, in the Democratic Party of FDR and the next cowboy president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. In the arena of presidential politics, TR’s frontier-style progressive reform would carry the frontier myth forward—for the most part under the mantle of a party different from his own—until the rise of Reaganesque conservatism in 1980. That same year TR’s eldest daughter, Alice (a supporter of Democrats JFK and LBJ), passed away at the age of ninety-six.

Theodore Roosevelt is unique among US presidents for the crucial role that he played in personally establishing the foundations of the frontier myth as the foremost interpretive framework for American society. His was also the first presidency to deploy the frontier and western myths and symbolism to understand, explain, and justify foreign and domestic situations—events—and to shape specific policy agendas that his administration adopted. The myth was accepted during the Roosevelt era and used as a discursive framework that would become durable and dynamic enough to explain the entire range of America’s experiences and policy in the twentieth century. No longer was the frontier restricted to the geographic area of the West. Roosevelt’s frontierism is one of the most important historic examples in support of Brian Dippie’s contention that myths are more important than facts in shaping some public policy. Ideas that existed in the popular mind, the arts, and various movements had consequences for the shape of American society and presidential politics. TR’s thesis of forward-thinking liberalism, proactive government, selective intervention abroad, and greater inclusion through a melting pot established the early contours of the frontier myth. This shaping of ideas about the western frontier experience would carry a great deal of power for decades to come and had major consequences for the attitudes, policies, and decisions made by future progressive presidents—LBJ in particular.

Roosevelt came to the White House during an age of tremendous industrial growth, and his modern approach to the presidency—with its heavy deployment of the frontier myth—raised questions that Americans still grapple with more than a century later. The decades between TR and LBJ would offer much more limited deployment of the myth by American presidents. During these early to mid-century decades, however, the frontier myth firmly established itself in American culture as the most persuasive structure for interpreting America’s past and providing solutions for the present and future.

Chapter 2

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON’S “SHOWDOWNS FOR PROGRESS”

Each of us, in our own way, is the product of a frontier, and the builder of a frontier in their time. America is the land of the perpetual frontier. We must carry with us the old virtues that we have needed on every frontier. . . . But we must add a new indispensable: the ability to . . . give wings to our hopes. I have in mind for this country a Great Society.

—Lyndon Johnson, October 8, 1964

The crucial half-century of the frontier myth, between liberal frontier presidents Theodore Roosevelt (TR) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), would set the stage for the full-blown acceptance and deployment of the myth in the frontier presidencies of LBJ, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. It also laid some of the groundwork for the wholesale political shift in the myth’s emphasis from liberalism to conservatism that would follow in the wake of the tumultuous events of the late 1960s and 1970s.

THE EARLY-TO MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRONTIER MYTH

From the early through the mid-twentieth century, the set of past experiences that Americans ascribed to their frontier heritage became guideposts for the present and a vision to inspire the future because they chose to view them as something crucial in their experience. “The West of the Imagination,” as the Goetzmanns coined it in their classic study of the western frontier as people imagined it,[1] informed Americans’ sense of identity, sense of community and place, foreign policy, and their purpose on Earth and into the “final frontier” of space. Frontier western imagery informed American policy and political life in profound ways that had meaning and consequences for Americans of all regions, races, religions, and political inclinations. At the same time, major events such as the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the early civil rights movement challenged and shaped the changing contours of the frontier myth. The political culture during this period reflects and reveals Americans’ ongoing search for answers and guidance in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.

In the realm of presidential politics, after Theodore Roosevelt’s failed Bull Moose campaign, two decades passed before his fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), came to office and implemented the New Deal. Only at this point was it possible to secure the liberal programs that TR had called for. In the meantime, post-TR Republicans occupied the White House from 1920 to 1932 in an era when there was no Roosevelt and no progressive Republican. Warren G. Harding’s scandal-ridden administration had called for a return to normalcy while President Calvin Coolidge (cowboy president Ronald Reagan’s favorite) was passive but popular. The hyperactive, progressive TR and indolent, conservative Cal struck a remarkable contrast.

Later in the interwar period, the faith that Herbert Hoover and the Republicans placed in business prosperity was badly shaken when, months after his inauguration in 1929, the bubble burst with a colossal stock market crash. The catastrophic Great Depression that followed contributed to the election of Democrat FDR in 1932 and the implementation of his experimental New Deal policies. Before long this translated into across-the-board federal government intervention throughout the American economy and society. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal set the tone for the next thirty-five years. From this point forward the substantive role of the federal government, which both Roosevelts had advocated for, looked as if it were in place to stay. In the early post–World War II era, even conservative Republicans’ loudest protest was no longer over whether the federal government had a right to intervene but to what degree.

During World War II and the Cold War, the frontier myth in political culture provided a compelling phenomenon for Americans as they attempted to interpret the world. By dividing people and nations into civilization and savagery, right and wrong, black and white, the frontier struck a highly responsive chord at times when Americans mobilized to face “evil” foreign enemies such as Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, and Soviet Russia.

The darker, cultural undercurrent of anticommunism in the United States that became especially intense during the postwar era also had important long-term implications for the nature of the frontier myth. For many American conservatives, and some liberals in the late 1940s and 1950s, life in Soviet Russia became one that was envisioned as a kind of opposite definition of America itself. One of the conservative tenets of the frontier myth, individualism, along with Americans’ accompanying concerns for civil liberties and property rights, were known to be disdained by the Reds in Moscow who emphasized collective rather than personal rights. Regarding a system that placed society ahead of the individual, Americans increasingly viewed the Russian people as having been reduced to manipulable objects who were incapable of independent thought or action. Those on the right were particularly hostile toward the “Commies” in the Kremlin and their alleged cradle-to-grave control over Soviet citizens. As Reader’s Digest reported with regularity, “There is no room . . . for mental independence. The only way to survive is to conform.”[2] Throughout the popular media, robotic, enslaved Soviets were depicted as stirring up revolutions, craving power, and living “in a godless, gray and regimented world. Worst of all, these miserable Russians intended to make the rest of the planet in their own dismal image.”[3] In the Digest’s September 1949 reprint from Life magazine, Life’s editors likened the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four’s sinister character of Big Brother to a “mating” of Hitler and Stalin, adding that “behind the iron curtain,” Orwell’s nightmare “will not seem strange or imaginative at all.”[4] The terms “mass society,” “the Holocaust,” “atomic warfare,” “propaganda,” and “totalitarianism” became infused with fear and urgency by the mid-twentieth century, and while there was a great deal of optimism for a progressive future among most Americans, this coexisted with a sense of fear that gripped the United States as well.

J. Fred MacDonald wrote that Cold War western dramas in all media featured heroic “individuals willing to risk everything to guarantee the well-being of average folks.”[5] In popular culture, the frontier hero represented law and order and individualism, along with support for the community and the progressive future. World War II had repeatedly displayed the extremes of human cruelty, and for many Americans, the Cold War saw things become even worse behind the Communist Iron Curtain. If Americans saw little about the recent historical past to put their minds at ease about the future, they could always turn to the frontier hero who answered to a higher law. Whether in its original radio and TV orientation toward children, or in the “adult” western that soon emerged, it was there on that “virgin land” that all of the alleged rugged and simple truths of frontier life could be portrayed most effectively. At its height, as many as sixty million viewers per night watched television westerns, and by January 1959, eight of the top ten programs were of that genre.[6] The western story’s pervasiveness during the postwar era is indicative of Americans’ fears of totalitarianism and global war in a nuclear age, and of the desire for simple answers in difficult times.[7] The frontier myth of this period, though not completely transformed by the event of the Cold War, was accommodating it in important ways. This retooling of the myth became increasingly evident during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson’s predecessor and active Cold Warrior, John F. Kennedy.

JFK AND THE “NEW FRONTIER”

If you landed in the United States at the beginning of the 1960s, you would find the public’s thoughts about the future of their country and the world to be an odd mixture of anxious concern and complacency. A content optimism still lingered from the experience of World War II and the unprecedented postwar economic boom. But beneath this seeming satisfaction lie an undercurrent of concern about the state of the nation and the world in the coming decade. The Soviets were winning the space race; Fidel Castro’s revolution in nearby Cuba had left a Communist state just ninety miles off of Key West, Florida; there was the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961, fear of dominoes collapsing in Southeast Asia, and anxieties over the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union—all of which had Americans on edge. At home, change was also in the air with civil rights. At the outset of the new decade, President Eisenhower appeared old, tired, and sick. The experience of the Cold War and other major events would see conservative interpretations of the frontier myth increasingly competing with liberal ones. Ambiguity and tensions within the myth began accelerating. Entering a new decade, many Americans sensed that their nation and their world were about to transform.

Unlike the four presidents who are the main focus of this book, President John F. Kennedy (1961–1963) did not care for ranches, Stetsons, or horse-opera westerns. In Profiles in Courage, JFK (or possibly Ted Sorensen, who actually wrote much of the manuscript) kept his two chapters about rugged western heroes Sam Houston and Thomas Hart-Benton at arm’s length, admiring but not claiming to be like one of them. At the end of JFK’s last speech, just hours before his assassination, the president of the Fort Worth, Texas, Chamber of Commerce presented him with a cowboy hat to remind him of his visit to the Lone Star State, but to the disappointment of the crowd, the commander in chief declined to put it on. As Byron Price observed, “Kennedy was no cowpuncher, real or imagined.”[8]

But even the Boston Brahmin Kennedy realized the power of drawing on images from America’s frontier past. JFK’s “New Frontier” was the key phrase used in his acceptance speech as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1960. Kennedy’s program was to be a reaffirmation of some of the values and beliefs central to the frontier myth. Americans had previously been challenged to fulfill their Manifest Destiny and obligation to settle the North American continent. The “motto” of pioneers who settled the West, the candidate declared, “was not ‘every man for himself’—but ‘all for the common cause.’” These frontier folk “were determined to make the new world strong and free—an example to the world, to overcome its hazards and hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from within and without.” Kennedy then recalled some of the same ideas that Theodore Roosevelt had tapped into five decades earlier:

Kennedy receives a cowboy hat (and boots) from Master of Ceremonies Ray Buck of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Texas. November 22, 1963. (Courtesy, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries)

Today some would say that those struggles are all over—that all the horizons have been explored—that all the battles have been won—that there is no longer an American frontier. . . . But I tell you the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. It would be easier to shrink from that New Frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric. . . . I believe that the times require imagination and courage and perseverance. I’m asking each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier. . . . For courage—not complacency—is our need today.[9]

Here JFK was picking up on TR’s and Turner’s belief that the frontier and westering experience was not only geographic but an idea that could be applied to social relations, politics, and foreign policy: a kind of innovation that was still relevant for the 1960s.

As president, Kennedy’s charisma and charm helped his administration implement a new vision where the old values emerged with a reinvigorated sense of virtue from another kind of wilderness. The Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, the Council for Physical Fitness, the space program—all emerged on Kennedy’s watch as his deputies put together a series of initiatives to implement this vision. In hindsight, though, Kennedy’s Camelot mystique had a much larger impact on his legacy than did his actual accomplishments. For the most part he was ineffective at persuading Congress to adopt New Frontier legislation, including civil rights and antipoverty programs. JFK’s foreign policy, meanwhile, included substantive failures (including the Bay of Pigs and early involvement in Vietnam) along with its successes (most notably, at least in the popular imagination, the Cuban Missile Crisis). But the youthful and sophisticated Kennedy did raise possibilities about what could be achieved: possibilities that his down-home successor—cowman LBJ—initially would realize with much more success.

THE RETURN OF A LIBERAL COWPOKE

If ever there was a president who was larger than life, it was the United States’ second cowboy president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ was so towering, in fact, that he had what some scholars refer to as “two presidencies.”[10] His “first presidency,” from 1963 to 1965, focused on domestic issues and would see LBJ flourish in office as the postwar, liberal frontier myth reached the peak of its influence and popularity. The “second” Johnson presidency, from 1966 to 1969, however, would place an emphasis on the Vietnam War—an event so powerful and transformative that the structure of the frontier myth as applied by Johnson would collapse under its own weight.

This chapter examines LBJ’s first presidency, including a careful development of Johnson’s western persona and his related efforts in support of civil rights, antipoverty programs, and the space race: frontiers where a liberal Democratic cowboy president could draw on the frontier past to craft a new future. The postwar myth had reached the peak of its power and influence during the early years of the LBJ administration, with the president riding a huge wave of national popularity. Historians have explained this remarkable support as deriving in large part from sympathy for the slain JFK, but here I argue that Lyndon Johnson’s adherence to the frontier myth structure and deployment of related symbolism played at least as important a role in his initial successes. By tapping into the powerful ideas and symbolism of this frontier-as-America vision, LBJ and his team were able to move more domestic legislation through Congress more quickly than any administration before or since. Indeed, it was a rare period when the federal government, suddenly, moved as fast and decisively as a Texas Ranger of old.

THE HERO

Alfred Steinberg wrote in Sam Johnson’s Boy that Lyndon Baines Johnson as a youth dreamed of becoming a millionaire, a cowboy hero, and a powerful politician. When outside politicians came to Johnson City, Texas, they would often pay courtesy calls on Lyndon’s father. Among the names LBJ remembered hearing his father and guests mention on the front porch was that of Theodore Roosevelt. They described with great excitement how TR came to San Antonio to assemble his Rough Riders for the War of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Eight. Every afternoon, Roosevelt would come galloping down to the Alamo Plaza near the hallowed shrine (which LBJ’s father had helped preserve), toss his reins to one of his men, and “plow into the Menger Hotel for his big daily ration of snorts at the bar.” On his fifty-eighth birthday in 1966, President Johnson reminded members of the press who had gathered at the LBJ Ranch that “a good many” of his liberal programs, including those focused on education, poverty, and youth, had been advocated by Theodore Roosevelt. “I am a great admirer of the contributions he made to the Nation,” gushed Johnson, “as you can see reflected in our conservation program. . . . The Presidents of that period and the President of today have a good many things in common—and we are getting some of them done now.”[11]

LBJ told the editor of the Texas Observer magazine in 1967 that TR was one of his biggest heroes and role models, “a great conservationist . . . a great cowboy.” Significantly, Johnson admired Theodore Roosevelt first and foremost, not for his charge up San Juan Hill, but for his protection of the wilderness and his “courage to stand up to predatory interests.” Years later LBJ explained to historian Doris Kearns that TR was the big local hero and that “whenever I pictured Teddy Roosevelt, I saw him running or riding, always moving, his fists clenched, his eyes glaring, speaking out against the interests on behalf of the people.” Johnson greatly admired the cowboy president TR, a man’s man of action, who seemed to epitomize the frontier code as an individual and as a forward-thinking chief executive. LBJ staffers later drew similar portraits of their boss to those that Johnson had rendered of TR (LBJ as “a man in a hurry,” of “driving determination; and every time he got interfered with the sparks flew”). Johnson took every opportunity to establish himself in the eyes of the public as a man of the frontier west, who, like TR, could improve the lives of those who had not been given a “square deal” opportunity to improve themselves. Though the frontier myth structure had been jostled and undergone some significant changes in emphases since TR’s day, its overall trajectory had returned to a similar course by the time LBJ became the nation’s chief executive in 1963.[12]

THE PREPRESIDENTIAL YEARS: LBJ GOES WESTERN

Lyndon Johnson was raised in the Texas Hill Country, a region just west of Austin where the agricultural South and ranch country West meet. Over the course of his career, the astute future president used this geographic and cultural intersection to full advantage. From Johnson’s own actions and the testimonies of his aides, it is clear that in the postwar era he fully understood that a “western” frontier political image and persona would serve him much better at the national level of politics than a southern one. When Johnson had run locally for Congress and, initially, for the Senate, he emphasized his southern roots to garner regional support (the Johnsons were originally from Georgia), but this changed drastically once LBJ, as Senate majority leader, began setting his sights on the presidency.

Senator Johnson’s need to remake himself as a westerner stemmed from his determination to separate his own image from the postwar images of an old, anachronistic, and decadent South and connect instead with the West, the region directly associated with the frontier-myth experience and seemingly brimming with potential and new developments. During his Senate days LBJ gradually replaced his southernness, a quality crucial in his rise to majority leader, with his westernness. Westward expansion had been tied closely to the American creation myth and promoted in the films, TV shows, and literature that were especially prominent in the 1950s and early 1960s. After World War II, the West was booming and seemed new, dynamic, and full of promise—and with it the attention to frontiering and the frontier myth reentered the American consciousness with as much impact as during Theodore Roosevelt’s day. The West (and by implication Johnson) was about the future, the South about the past. In addition to moving away from his southern regional persona, LBJ would also add to his range of imagery the qualities described in Turner’s frontier thesis, such as freedom, individualism, self-reliance, and honor. This transformation was crucial to LBJ’s rise to national leadership and his apparent ultimate goal of occupying the Oval Office.

In 1957 an aide of Senator Johnson’s sent him a memo offering her boss some sage advice: “Western Films and Stars are very popular right now as you know,” she wrote. “And I can’t think of a more perfect Western Star than the tall, dark and handsome, horse-riding, gun-toting-shootin’ ’n huntin’ Lyndon Johnson of the Hill Country of Texas.” The aide conjured up the idea for an episode of the popular TV show This Is Your Life, in which LBJ would be the lead rider “in a cloud of dust . . . coming over the rise from . . . in back of the ranch house.” Then she provided what was perhaps the most compelling rationale for the creation of a new LBJ. “This kind of appearance would . . . discredit those who write of you as a Southerner.” No southerner had prevailed in a presidential election since before the Civil War, and Lyndon Johnson and his staff knew what he needed to do.[13]

During his first two decades in Congress and the Senate, from 1937 to 1957, Johnson had voted as a white southerner, with other southerners, thirty-nine times on civil rights issues—including six times against proposals to abolish the poll tax and twice against legislation to prohibit and punish lynching. But by the late 1950s, Senate majority leader Johnson had pulled up anchor from his southern sensibilities to pursue the broader goals of national politics. Now Johnson increasingly embraced and projected the mythic image of an iconic western frontier rancher, supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and arguing that if Democrats did not support the bill they would pay for it at the polls during the 1958 congressional elections. Since World War II and the fight against the racial oppression of Nazi Germany, America had been moving further away from its Gone with the Wind image of the South, embracing instead the much more inclusive image of frontier western democracy. LBJ’s actions indicate that he sensed this change in mood and adjusted his own political image and actions accordingly. In what appeared to some as a complete turnaround, he now tried to convince his old friend Senator Richard Russell of Georgia and other southern senators in 1957 and 1960 that the time had at least come not to oppose civil rights legislation. This reorientation for Johnson—most clearly demonstrated by his creative and successful support as majority leader for the Civil Rights Act of 1957—was an act not of the stereotypical hotheaded, emotional southerner, but of a determined, pragmatic westerner. LBJ had given up his twenty years as an Old South segregationist and attached himself instead to the values of the postwar frontier myth—playing to a national audience rather than a regional one. Moderate columnist Roscoe Drummond concluded, “Because [LBJ] voted for and is an architect of the right-to-vote [law], he is the first Southern Democratic leader since the Civil War to be a serious candidate for the presidential nomination.” Johnson built on this momentum in 1959 when he shifted his membership from the southern caucus to the caucus of western Democrats. More and more Lyndon Johnson appeared in front of the media wearing his Stetson and boots while riding on horseback. Pushed by national changes in attitudes toward race relations (including, quite possibly, his own) and enticed by the looming presidential campaign, he broke repeatedly with his Dixie cronies until, in 1960, he opposed them by voting in the affirmative on eight roll-call votes for civil rights. Johnson was at work to form an interregional consensus that would benefit his own national aspirations and looked toward the future rather than the past. In so doing, he became a national figure tied to the frontier mythic West.[14]

A key aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s growing reliance on the frontier-myth structure, and the related increase in his national appeal, involved emphasizing personal, cultural connections with the West through his dress, speeches, published writings, campaign literature, and the extensive development of the LBJ Ranch near Austin. Bedecked in western wear and relaxing at his twenty-seven-hundred-acre spread, the Hill Country Texan attempted to rid himself of his magnolia scent (at least outside of Dixie) and intentionally looked and played out the role of a westerner during the years immediately leading up to, and including, his terms as vice president and president. Overnight, it seemed, LBJ began authoring articles that appeared in journals such as The Cattleman, with the Senate leader promoting the importance of federal support for misunderstood ranchers out west. Georgia senator Russell’s executive assistant, William Jordan, described the puzzling dilemma in Dixie: “Senator Johnson came here a Southern Senator, but then all of a sudden he began to claim he was Western senator. Texas was no longer a ‘Southern’ state, it was a ‘Western’ state. As time moved on and Senator Johnson’s career developed, he became a ‘Westerner.’” Jordan added that, by the late 1950s, “Senator Johnson was a Western Senator . . . self-described.”[15]

In the final years of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, several members of the press corps, also caught up in the power of the frontier paradigm, bought fully into the new Johnson-as-cowpoke image. In early 1959 Stewart Alsop of the Saturday Evening Post reported that the “country around the LBJ Ranch was the true American frontier, and there is still a smell of the vanished frontier about it.” The LBJ Ranch, meanwhile, “could be rented out as a background for a Wild West movie, and the ranch house itself is most decidedly a Western ranch house—it has nothing at all in common with the pillared and magnolia-draped Southern plantation house of tradition.” Alsop, a favorite journalist of Johnson’s (and spotted from time to time lounging in the Johnsons’ kidney-shaped swimming pool) then applied “the smell of the frontier” to LBJ himself: “The closeness of his frontier background,” he contended, “also explains a good deal of things about Johnson—the restless optimism of the man, and also the roughness and rudeness of which he is markedly capable. . . . These . . . are the first three things to understand about Johnson—that he is a frontiersman by instinct, with the roughness and restlessness of the frontier; that he is a Westerner at heart rather than a Southerner; and that he is driven and harried by the need to succeed.” Here, in Alsop’s vision of Johnson, was the frontier myth once again personified in a major political figure. With the passage of the civil rights bill, his full-on cowboy imagery, and a ranch to bolster his credentials, LBJ remade himself into a national politician based on the frontier myth. Enhancing national, forward-thinking aspirations symbolized in values of the postwar myth—optimism, determined pragmatism, expanding opportunity, a promise of prosperity for all, conservation of America’s “wild” spaces, manly toughness, inclusion, democracy, and an obligation to those who had sacrificed (including not only frontier pioneers but those American veterans of all races who had recently defended their nation)—as opposed to the widely perceived backwardness of the South with all its race problems and seemingly feudal social and economic circumstances, LBJ now allied himself with a different set of concerns than those that predominated in regional Southern politics.[16]

For staffer George W. Siegel, Johnson’s efforts “to try to shed himself of the burden [of section], especially the Democratic Party political burden of a Southerner,” were not simply a deliberate political ploy but something more complex. LBJ and his staff were pursuing liberal and civil rights policies much better attuned with mid-twentieth-century western imagery (and contained within the structures of the contemporary frontier myth) than the public’s association with the South. To Siegel, Johnson “thought like” a westerner. Siegel’s off-the-cuff assumption that being a westerner was the most “preferable” of possible identities for his boss, meanwhile, is a telling reflection of the nation’s mind-set at that point in time: that the most appealing American values and imagery were to be found in the West, or at least in the idea of the West.[17]

Though Johnson did not officially announce himself as a candidate for the presidency until one week prior to the Democratic National Convention in July 1960, LBJ the cowboy had hit the campaign trail long before that. As early as February, Newsweek reported that Johnson’s “deputized posse of at least 75 Texas supporters—tall, virile men in boots who boomingly referred to their leader as ‘The Great Westerner’” had launched “the great Texas invasion” at Albuquerque’s Western Skies Hotel. The deputies’ occupation had one objective: “To convince Western Democrats at the Western States Democratic Conference that Texan Lyndon Johnson is really one of them—a true son of the purple sage.” The magazine’s editor reasoned that LBJ was trying hard to “shuck off” his southern ties and persona to throw his lot in with the West as Johnson happily “entered into the spirit of the Western motif” by posing for photographers with a burro and waving his Stetson high in the air. Colorado’s governor Steve McNichols was reported as saying that “Johnson looked like an honest-to-gosh Westerner.” All this was not lost on editorial cartoonist John R. Fischetti, who drew a tall, lanky cowboy Johnson leaning, almost falling, in the direction of a young “Western Delegates” cowgirl while an infatuated southern belle—no longer Johnson’s first choice—looked onward from across the room. “There’s plenty of me for everybody,” the cartoon LBJ still contended. But many culturally conservative, southern whites would have none of this, and soon editors from the former Confederacy were labeling LBJ as an opportunist who had turned his back on the South and adopted a frontier persona and values that directly threatened the very “way of life” he had allegedly been voted in to protect. The Jackson (MS) Daily News tore into Johnson and his “synthetic Western” campaign in Albuquerque: “Now that he is safely across the border [in New Mexico],” fumed its editor, “we hope he finds comfort in the cactus bed that he has made for himself, sleeping snugly alongside the NAACP, AFL-CIO, the Civil Rights Selfish Committee and a host of other Texas-hating left-wing punks who delight in slaughtering the South in the pious name of tolerance.”[18]

When all the ballots were counted at the Democratic National Convention on July 15, 1960, Johnson finished second to John F. Kennedy in the run for the party’s next presidential contender. A substantive proportion of white southern Democrats were even more shaken by the fact that LBJ then agreed to throw his lot in as a vice presidential candidate on the Kennedy ticket. Their “own” candidate had taken up the values of JFK, a liberal New Englander, and of the frontier West, as opposed to those of Johnson’s own “homeland.” Now LBJ was being labeled by these white southerners as a turncoat for embracing the values of inclusion on civil rights and for rejecting the symbolism of the Old Confederacy and states’ rights in favor of the enforcement of rights for blacks and other minorities. Attuned with the rest of the nation and its traditions, values, and aspirations, Johnson understood the messages and power of the frontier myth at that point in time. As he put it himself, the nation “is moving to the left; you can either move with it or be crushed.” In the end, LBJ did not “lose” the South in the process of emphasizing this liberal, national agenda of social justice and equality of opportunity, but his support base among whites in the region was weakened (just as it was strengthened throughout the rest of the country); at least as importantly, his decisions and actions would have long-term consequences that continue to affect party politics in the South today (a point we return to in later chapters).[19]

In the context of late 1950s’ American politics and society, Lyndon Johnson understood where the wind was blowing and hoisted his sail. As Senate majority leader, the Civil Rights Act had been his signal achievement, the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. The act served as a large step in his transformation from a southern to a western frontier national figure. Like millions of Americans, including some southerners, Johnson would clearly associate himself with the principles of the multiregional frontier myth—a vision in sync in many ways with the New England senator John Kennedy, who himself promised a “New Frontier” for America’s future. JFK was no cowboy figure for the nation in the literal sense, but his running mate, Lyndon Johnson, the “westerner,” surely could be. In 1960 JFK needed LBJ as his running mate at least as much and maybe more than McKinley had needed TR six decades earlier. As the Kennedy-Johnson campaign geared up, LBJ sought to sell the inclusive Democratic ticket by preparing to harness frontier symbolism in a way not seen since TR ran for office.

At the outset of the 1960 campaign, vice presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson offered JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, some revealing advice: “Sell the Johnson image. . . . You know, like Marshal Matt Dillon . . . big, six-feet-three, good-looking—a tall, tough Texan coming down the street.”[20]

Of LBJ’s numerous “cowboy spectacles” of the 1960 campaign—and there were many—one early stunt exemplifies the determination with which LBJ was willing to flaunt his frontier persona and demonstrates the growing national appeal of the frontier myth. It happened far from the Hill Country in a region that has always been a world apart from Texas. Elizabeth Rowe, a longtime friend of the Johnsons, describes her experience when she joined Lyndon and his wife, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson, to begin campaigning for the vice presidency in Boston, Massachusetts:

VP candidate Johnson’s grin comes across as a bit forced in this photo taken at Copley Plaza in Boston (perhaps he was calculating the stunt’s impact on voters). The commandeered Beantown police horse, meanwhile, appears somewhat ill at ease with its Texas Hill Country rider. (LBJ Library, Photo No. 60-9-26, September 8, 1960, courtesy of FayFoto, Boston, Massachusetts)

The plane came in, and lined up at the Boston Airport were a dozen and more little dumpy women, all with great big cowboy hats on. They were all the Italian population of Boston, all good Democrats, and all absolutely overpowered by these great big hats. . . . Then we got over to the Copley Plaza. There was a policeman directing traffic on a horse, and [Lyndon] just said to the policeman, “If you will get off that horse, I’ll get on.” So he got on the horse and pranced around the square a little while. This was the starting of “from Boston to Austin.”[21]

Without Johnson’s help in squeaking out victories in Texas, key states in the West, and part of the South, JFK would most certainly have gone down to defeat to Richard Nixon in the 1960 race—the closest presidential contest until that time. By the slimmest of margins, this odd couple of running mates pulled out the first White House victory for the Democratic Party since 1948.

THE WHITE HOUSE LOOKS WEST

After serving 1,036 days as John F. Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson became the second “cowboy” to be elevated to the presidency following a chief executive’s assassination. The iconography of the American leader from John Fitzgerald Kennedy to Lyndon Baines Johnson changed suddenly and drastically. Johnson had no inclination to copy JFK and the eastern establishment “Harvards”—which would not have worked for him anyway—he had something better in mind.

The Texas Observer, which had followed Johnson’s political career for decades, saw changes coming in its November 29 piece, “President Johnson’s Frontiers.” The Johnsons were “country people” and Lyndon “the President from the rocky hills where Texas begins to be western.” Many of the Harvard types would have “less to do in Washington now, and different sorts of people, Western sorts, Texas sorts, and moderate Southern sorts will have more to do there.” In an article that not only contained the word “frontier” in its title but used it repeatedly in its text, the Observer pondered whether LBJ would continue on with his “national” liberal agenda or revert to his more provincial “middish” positions as a southern Senate majority leader. Here the frontier and the West were viewed as accommodating America as a whole, and Johnson the cowboy president, through the deployment of his frontier persona, could seek to craft himself as a truly national president. “President Johnson has his own frontier to remember, and,” the Observer concluded optimistically, “a great frontier to seek.” Similarly, Tom Wicker of the New York Times observed that “there are distinctive things about him, springing from his environment and the myths and traditions to which it gave birth. . . . For the new President thinks big, in the expansive, can-do, believe-me style of the West.” Journalist Jim Bishop declared that “the 6000 odd acres of hill country which [Johnson] owns are not land and pasture and stone—they are him.” Lady Bird also liked her husband’s front-and-center frontier persona as the right “type” to lead a grief-stricken nation. Once she commented that she sometimes daydreamed that the hero of her favorite TV show, Gunsmoke (whom Lyndon believed he resembled), visited the LBJ Ranch. While driving past a little house on the edge of the hill Lady Bird told Bishop, “I can just picture Marshal Dillon riding up to that place.”[22]

Just days after Kennedy’s assassination, one presidential adviser recorded how he never forgot the image of a mover at the White House packing up JFK’s trademark rocking chair while another walked in and deposited LBJ’s cowboy saddle. The saddle signaled Johnson’s own attachment to his western environment and allowed the new president to help project himself as a national leader with a national message that would serve an atemporal and unassailable American agenda embodied in the frontier myth: one that included freedom and equality of opportunity for all people. The testing points of regional (southern) bigotry and economic disparity, under the worn regional voices of mere sections of America, could not stand in opposition to a national mandate—and thus self-evident mandate—which included civil rights, a war on poverty, and conservation of America’s wilderness, along with the promotion of Turner’s frontier qualities of optimism, progress, and unlimited opportunity. As we shall see, the host of federal programs that lay on the horizon in an LBJ administration would actively and aggressively seek to carry on the alleged achievements of the American frontier experience through the power and will of the national government.[23]

The pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the frontier myth meant that it would consciously and unconsciously be understood. Likewise the deployment of the myth’s associated symbolism, whether intentional or not, was a key aspect of its power and influence—and of Johnson’s early success as president. Americans recalled that Owen Wister’s classic cowboy character, the Virginian—foreman at the Shiloh Ranch—was deliberately infused with the values of both the primitive and the civilized, fitting in just as well in the land of the gentlemen of the East (with his tailor and appreciation of the classics) as he did in Wyoming. LBJ projected a similar image that appeared to personify and reaffirm the old values of individualism and self-reliance in a changing “eastern”-directed future. Sometimes this manifested itself in policy but other times was more aesthetic in nature. Look magazine reported, in pictures and words, that “as the occasion demands, Johnson can be urbane and sophisticated amid the splendor of his Washington office or ruggedly ‘rural’ as he relaxes on his large Texas ranch.” But it was the LBJ Ranch itself, above all else, that offered the most vivid projection of the president in his new role as lead cowman for the nation.[24]

HOME ON THE LBJ RANCH

The LBJ Ranch, purchased in 1951, served Lyndon Johnson as the epitomizing symbol of his frontier persona and policy making. During the 1950s it was the locale LBJ used to hone his political image as he used the ranch and his own style of “barbeque diplomacy” to highlight his growing identification with the West and the future. In 1959 he purchased a JetStar Aircraft, built a 3,570-foot airstrip at the ranch, and laid plans for improved guest rooms designed to accommodate national and international activities. The ranch was being transformed both in the physical and symbolic sense: a reflection of LBJ’s efforts to create a persona conducive to his goals of national office. In western movies and other forms of popular culture, ranches had become symbolic and a setting in which Americans of all regions could feel culturally at home. The frontier experience transcended regionalism and represented what the public initially saw as the quintessential American experience. By owning a ranch, Johnson benefited from the myth to strengthen his standing with an electorate that increasingly shared the values of the mass media and its infatuation with the frontier myth. Within a few short years he used his new rancher persona and the ranch’s symbolism to help reinvent himself by not only transforming his image from that of a regional to a national figure but by showcasing himself as a self-made man—two themes especially inherent in the western myths of the mid-twentieth century. Johnson, it seemed, was never far from his “Heart’s Home.” In his five years as president, Johnson flew to the ranch on seventy-four occasions and spent about one-quarter of his time there.[25]

Johnson’s rise to national prominence paralleled the rise in the popularity of the western and the belief that it represented the national character. Western movies and TV programs encompassed national anxieties and aspirations. The West itself became a kind of parable for American society and the challenges offered up in the past, how Americans resolved these offered ways of dealing with new tensions in the present, and also of planning for the future. Americans could return to their alleged origins to find the determination and means of facing problems of the modern world. The nation as a whole shifted westward in the postwar years, and LBJ plugged into the nostalgia of an older, simpler America. Many of the “American” characteristics described in the frontier thesis—the qualities of self-reliance, hard work, straight shooting, and the frontier spirit—were shown as embodied in the LBJ Ranch. For Harper’s magazine, it only seemed natural and “about time” that an “LBJ” ranch-boss of the Texas Hill Country would inhabit the White House. “It strikes one as curious that out of the geography of this great common national romance, the national legend,” wrote Marshall Frady, “out of the landscape of Tom Mix, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Marshal Dillon—only in this decade did a President finally emerge.”[26]

As Ronnie Dugger has contended, LBJ was certainly aware that he could enhance his own political posture as a man “rooted in the soil” if he owned a ranch near where he was born. But for Lyndon Johnson—a Texan complete with his Stetson hat, drawl, and working cattle ranch (like TR, LBJ had a working ranch as opposed to Ronald Reagan’s hobby ranch or George W. Bush’s ranch with no livestock), the West appears to have a connection that was not only opportunistic but personal and ideological as well. In his 1965 State of the Union address LBJ posed a question to himself on where he found guidance to lead the country, responding, “The answer was waiting for me in the land where I was born.” LBJ’s twentieth-century ranching and western connections were part of his own sense of identity and an apparently genuine belief in a national mission, a “Golden West” of great wealth and opportunity for enterprising men (like himself), and a place of promise and democracy. In short, as with TR, Johnson equated his own sense of identity with that of the nation’s—and as Marshall Sahlins might explain, it was personal and ideological for LBJ because the frontier experience and its surrounding myths were so entrenched as the dominant discourse that they explained American society and, with that, LBJ himself.[27]

The film about Lyndon Johnson’s life still being shown at the LBJ National Historical Park (or LBJ Ranch) when I visited in 2011 emphasizes this frontier “man of the land” theme. The Hill Country: Lyndon Johnson’s Texas was produced by NBC News and first broadcast on May 9, 1966. In the opening scene the narrator declares, “A land of big skies and long horizons . . . When the chance comes to refresh his spirit, renew his strength, Lyndon Johnson goes back to the place of his roots. To the people and the land he has known and been part of all his life. The president goes home.” LBJ then describes how his own ancestors lived on the edge of civilization and savagery, as Indians attempted to loot and kill at the Johnson homestead. His grandfather drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, and would put his guns “there” in the local old fort “used against the Indians,” and in detail LBJ conveys how his grandmother Eliza Bunton and her child survived an Indian raid on their house. Johnson then describes his hard work ethic as a boy, drilled into him by his father, when he spent the summers on the ranch “riding this pasture from daylight until dark, every day”; and once again how with pluck, hard work, and determination, anybody could be president. Later in the film, LBJ boasts of his ranch’s “revolution with soil conservation” and especially about its access to cheap electric power “that all resulted from the power of government [that is, LBJ] to bring the greatest good to the greatest number.” At one point the NBC interviewer asks, “Mr. President, do you suppose that you’ll be the last president to come off the land?” to which Johnson responds, “No, I don’t think so. I think there is something about the land . . . that gives you an understanding of humanity, and gives you an appreciation of other countries and other civilizations.” Employing Jeffersonian-like ideals, he adds, “I believe that land is our greatest source of wealth, and a man who understands and appreciates it would better understand democracy itself, our system of government, and all the people who live on the land.” Here was Turner’s egalitarian democracy springing directly from LBJ’s heartland in the Texas Hills. Here, too, LBJ’s ranch provided a kind of safety valve from the problems and complexities of the cities, a place where savagery and civilization had once met and improved upon the American, “this new man,” opening up new possibilities of inexhaustible wealth, the promise of new innovations, and social improvements all—in the context of the twentieth century—with the helping hand of the federal government.[28]

“LBJ Country” was not portrayed as anything like Manhattan or Washington, DC, but a mythic “real” America inhabited by folks who were free from the corruptions of the East, worked the land for a living, and when they shook hands meant business. This hardscrabble region provided the perfect stage for the Democratic Party’s liberal programs. Johnson frequently used the Hill Country to illustrate the problems of rural America and the poor. In the Hill Country documentary he told viewers that rural electrification of the 1930s had brought some relief and lifted his region into the twentieth century but that much more had to be done there and in the nation as a whole. Johnson regularly cited his experiences as a young man growing up in rural Texas as a kind of cornerstone of his rationale for pursuing poverty, social, and education programs.

Of all the programs LBJ thought crucial to the success of the Great Society, education topped the list. The Education Bill of 1965—one of sixty education measures brought in during his presidency and LBJ’s personal favorite—was signed at a ceremony in the Junction Schoolhouse that Lyndon had attended as a boy. For LBJ, education would serve as the great equalizer in American society—giving Americans from even the most impoverished background the chance to make it in mainstream society. As such, education served the same purpose now as the frontier had in the past. He wanted “every child to have all the education he could take,” and his goals included free, public education through college for every child. It epitomized LBJ’s bootstraps philosophy that once the friendly federal government stepped in to offer a helping hand and level the playing field of opportunity, the trials of the past could be overcome. Alongside these goals, LBJ declared an “unconditional war on poverty,” which he drove through Congress with enormous fanfare. The Sunday Times of London commented that “it was perhaps the most bellicose program of social reform in history. It was to be a war on poverty,” explained in the media with western metaphors and symbols: “Federal funds were to be ‘fired in’ to the pockets of poverty in what was known in Washington as ‘the rifle-shot approach.’”[29] Along the way, Johnson seemingly either imagined or felt the need to exaggerate the poverty of his own youth to achieve these goals, because he did so often. It was a manipulation of western symbolism that, apart from Ronald Reagan, only LBJ (at least in his “first” presidency) could have pulled off so successfully.

The significance of the LBJ Ranch as a place of “westernness” and as a national symbol was only enhanced by the fact that the press quickly hyped and reported on almost every event held there. The White House Social Files also reveal that, before long, churches, Rotary clubs, and schools from around the country began writing in to Lady Bird’s personal secretary, inquiring how they could re-create the “western” LBJ Ranch and barbeque events in New York, Minneapolis, and Massachusetts. A school in Weymouth, Massachusetts, staged “Christmas in Texas at the LBJ Ranch” as the theme of its Christmas pageant. A senior-class party in Belleview, Missouri; a Sunshine Club just outside Boston; Fall Fair in Pittsburgh; and an Annual Sports, Vacation, and Trailer show in Long Beach, California, likewise all planned to host their own faux “Bar-B-Que at the LBJ Ranch” or “Presidential Barbeque . . . in the old western style” events. Throughout every region of the country, “frontier” and” LBJ” events were being celebrated and embraced.[30]

Re-creating one of these BBQ-at-the-ranch affairs with much accuracy would have made for an expensive undertaking. Richard “Cactus” Pryor—a Will Rogers–like radio personality on the Johnsons’ radio station KTBC in Austin—performed the role of master of ceremonies at a dozen or more LBJ Ranch get-togethers. In an oral history interview from September 1968, Cactus described his colorful experiences at LBJ’s “western” barbeques for a variety of dignitaries and heads of state. Local caterer Walter Jetton would set up his “chuck wagon,” portable BBQ pits, and a whole beef on a rotating spit (apparently this was for optics as Jetton “use[d] the same beef over and over”); cows were staked out on the other side of the river for atmosphere; round tables featured checkered tablecloths and coal-oil lanterns; iron wash pots full of butter were scattered around for guests to dip their corn on the cob; bales of hay were added; and all the helpers dressed in strictly western attire. “It had all the look and feel,” said Cactus, “of a ‘chuck wagon’ dinner.” For entertainment there was Mary Tuggle, “an expert with a bull whip. . . . She is a very attractive blonde girl, and came riding in on a horse full speed, cracking a whip.” The Johnsons also liked inviting Bill McElroy of the Texas Rangers to put on a pistol-shooting demonstration. Gene Autry, a friend of the Johnsons since the 1940s, and other cowboy stars often attended the Johnsons’ barbeques. LBJ himself would typically be dressed in his Stetson, poplin jacket, tan sports shirt, boots, and spurs. The Johnson staff served up their western barbeque with six-shooter coffee (a brew “so strong it will float a.44”) and passed out numerous gifts. Sometimes the president ordered batches of three hundred official “LBJ” Stetson ranch hats to give away, along with western saddles, spurs, and cowboy outfits for adults and kids—one having been fitted out for the twenty-two-month-old crown prince of Iran. At an evening with German chancellor Ludwig Erhard in late December 1963, LBJ presented cowboy hats to all the visitors, “and they put them on to the glory of the Press.” Newsweek had dubbed the latter event as “Stetson Statesmanship.” The quintessentially eastern New Yorker’s assessment of the LBJ Ranch and the ’64 presidential campaign, meanwhile, was that the LBJ “barbeques as a symbol compare favorably with the 1952 hole in Adlai Stevenson’s shoe.” Again, the cowboy hats, barbeque, and frontier entertainment were not just regional themes; they were national themes, the part representing the whole. The western talk and symbolism reflected the whole country, regardless of regional geography, for in the eyes of Americans and foreign visitors alike, the western frontier of the imagination had long since ceased to be so much a location as an idea of a place and time. The myth also provided guidance to the present generation of Americans as they contemplated the future that they wanted to build.[31]

LBJ, like Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner, believed that to understand the history of the United States one had to understand the history of the American frontier. In the spring of 1967, Johnson flew thirty Latin American ambassadors from Washington to the ranch for an enormous barbeque bash that would include LBJ’s vision of the frontier myth. Cactus Pryor described how the president hired actors to “perform” reenactments of the settlement of the West, to an amazed group of foreign dignitaries, friends, and the press. “The Fandango” featured buckboards, stagecoaches, a calliope pulled by horses: “they have Indians and battles, the whole thing you know.” For one song, “Punching Cows,” even Johnson’s Herefords got into the act as props with “cowboys across the river actually herding LBJ cattle.” The grandiose display gave many visitors a sense that it was all a window into the powerful character, rugged individualism, and morals-building experience thought to characterize the old cattle drives. As Hal K. Rothman observed, “It was as if the world of the Western movie had come to life.” These outdoor theatrics were not just entertainment but a vivid example of how the idea of the frontier, as the definition of American society and culture, had become deeply entrenched in national thought and in the president’s own mind. As for most of his foreign guests, their impressions of how Americans saw themselves and the world around them must have appeared to have been confirmed.[32]

A Texas “Fandangle” performed at the barbeque for Latin American ambassadors, LBJ Ranch, April 1, 1967. (Courtesy LBJ Library, Photo No. C4932-A8)

The LBJ Ranch “experience” demonstrates the power of social and cultural structures such as the frontier myth to accommodate a nation’s self-identity and almost everything that occurs in society. Americans and those familiar with the myths and ideas of the frontier West saw in the ranch a cultural resonance that fit their preconceived notions of the “real America”—not cities and industry but a rural “spread” that seemed to represent a simpler vision of a nation of working people who appreciated community and order. But the ranch was also the place where many of LBJ’s helping-hand progressive programs were conceived and promoted. Here was a genuine American, Lyndon B. Johnson, in the genuine America. And here in Stonewall, Texas, was the tangible expression of a frontier experience that seemed to provide for an American past as impressive and spectacular as those of other nations that could trace their histories back much further in time.

“TALL IN THE SADDLE”

During the early days of his presidency, when the frontier myth had reached a pinnacle of its influence, LBJ’s much-hyped cowboy skills and battles of man against beast also played well with most of the American public—only enhancing further the significance of his ranch while bolstering Johnson’s own frontier credentials. “He’s a crack shot, a fine horseman, a no-nonsense angler, and he knows every blade of the hill country of Texas,” proclaimed Argosy magazine in its special October 1964 feature, “LBJ Outdoor Sportsman.” LBJ was described as an avid naturalist, “soil-loving rancher,” the “first real ‘outdoorsman’ since Teddy Roosevelt, the first since T.R. who can sit on a horse, rope a calf and handle a gun with the casual ease of a man who has lived much of his life out of doors.” After this big buildup, friends of Johnson’s were quoted as saying, “He’s a damned fine shot . . . real deliberate with a gun . . . the hardest hunter you ever saw. . . . can navigate by the stars,” rides a horse “with the grace and bearing of a man born to the saddle,” and has “an insatiable appetite about nature in general.” The friendly columnist for Argosy must have had his tongue in his cheek when he also wrote that LBJ was a talented fisherman but did not exploit his fishing prowess in front of the press “because he’s basically honest” and “has never encouraged this approach to his political image” (!). Johnson’s longtime staffer and press secretary George Reedy’s account of LBJ’s outdoorsman abilities were not quite as glowing. Reedy wrote that the ranch was close to Johnson because it gave him a sense of identity. But he also revealed that LBJ’s “self-painted portrait of a cattleman tending his herds . . . was difficult to accept with a straight face. He did know something about cattle but he ‘tended’ them from a Lincoln Continental with a chest full of ice and a case of scotch and soda in the back seat.” Reedy’s shot of reality aside, the plethora of good press for LBJ’s rancher and outdoorsman persona may have had much less substance to it than TR’s did, but the puffed-up Johnson-as-hunter-frontiersman imagery became fixed, striking a responsive chord with much of the American public in the early 1960s.[33]

Through the LBJ Ranch and stories of the president’s hunting, riding, and shooting acumen, LBJ could personally and politically tap into part of the Teddy Roosevelt mystique and its vigorous, masculine elements of the frontier myth. LBJ, “tall in the saddle,” as the Washington Post described him, was no longer viewed predominantly as a DC Beltway insider or a southerner but as a western frontiersman, a president who maintained a level of both personal and national vitality though his individual interactions with the frontier. So long as the frontier myth remained an explanation for the American experience and lifeways (as depicted in LBJ’s virtual frontier reenactments for willing press writers)—it served Lyndon Johnson extremely well. It was a frontier persona so desirable at this time, in fact, that another major political figure would attempt to rope the White House away from LBJ by beating him at his own game. But the frontier myth of the early to mid-1960s was not able to accommodate this rival cowboy’s ultraconservative style and less inclusive brand of politics—at least not just yet.[34]

President Johnson celebrates his election victory the previous day by demonstrating his cattle-herding prowess for the press at the LBJ Ranch, November 4, 1964. (© Getty Images)

THE LIBERAL FRONTIER MYTH REESTABLISHED

Although it wrestled with liberal and conservative symbolic elements, the liberal frontier myth had reestablished itself as the primary interpretive framework for American society in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At this stage it had both encompassed and was key to the Johnson administration’s promotion of its ambitious Great Society programs. Frontier visions were symbolic of an optimistic and hopeful future that was inclusive of the civil rights movement, Medicare, and Head Start education programs; aimed to ensure equality of opportunity; provided a rationale for the “New Conservation” greening initiatives; and inspired the pioneering of space exploration. The myth’s structure was emerging for LBJ as a given, and the president’s programs slid right into place alongside the popular western imagery of the day. But like accidental cowboy president TR, before seeing his initiatives through fully, Johnson first required the kind of mandate that he could only obtain at the polling booth.

1964 CAMPAIGN SHOOTOUT

Given the stature and influence of the frontier myth during this era, it was only fitting that 1964 would be the only US presidential election campaign featuring two verifiable cowboy candidates: President Lyndon Baines Johnson of the Texas Hill Country and Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Phoenix, Arizona, who would face each other in the final race. Liberals and conservatives both hoped to exploit the myth and its symbolism as representing their visions for the nation. But in the context of the events and myth structure of 1964, the liberal Democrat LBJ held the upper hand.

Barry Goldwater’s constituency was made up for the most part of those Americans who were unhappy with liberalism and the state of the nation and who admired a style of action that seemed frozen in the nineteenth century. In terms of regions he appealed especially to white voters in the Deep South and conservative southwesterners. Goldwater told Americans that “freedom today is dependent on government confinement” and actively opposed virtually every federal government policy initiative since the Hoover administration. In the area of foreign policy, the Arizona senator insisted that the nation needed to pursue a domino theory in reverse by promoting American democracy and values to topple communist regimes, belligerently calling upon his fellow Arizonans and countrymen to “declare the World Communist movement an outlaw in the community of civilized nations.”[35]

Of all the frontier values outlined by Turner and TR, rugged individualism was Goldwater’s number-one and most pervasive theme. The Republican presidential candidate lauded the “simple” wisdom of America’s past with black-and-white solutions that deemphasized international cooperation and believed that increased freedom and liberty could only be achieved in individuals, businesses, and communities if they were allowed to manage their own affairs. As for his own persona, like LBJ, Goldwater claimed that his frontier family in Arizona personified bravery, self-reliance, and the strenuous life. (Also, like his opponent, he left out some facts that did not appear to fit the stories—most notably that his parents, Baron and Jojo, got rich not only from hard work but through lucrative federal government contracts.) Goldwater told audiences of his family’s frontier heritage in Arizona and attempted to fit into this mold on twentieth-century terms by becoming an explorer, jet pilot, innovative businessman, and outdoor photographer. Images taken of “AuH_20,” sometimes by himself, typically showed him in frontier guises. In one well-publicized image by the renowned photographer Yousuf Karsh the senator posed in a cowboy hat, buckskin jacket, and jeans with a rifle at the ready on a faux background of huge Sonoran Desert cacti. Karsh apparently understood the obvious contrast between myth and reality (perhaps better than did the candidate himself) as he chose to shoot Goldwater not defending helpless frontier folk but in front of a swimming pool surrounded by lawn chairs. Goldwater, Robert Goldberg has observed, was cast as a “legitimate son of the Old West.”[36]

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, 1963. Photograph by Yousuf Karsh. (Reproduced with permission. © Yousuf Karsh)

Through pursuing this frontier persona, Goldwater had effectively freed himself of the old negative portrayals of Republicans as stiff, country-club, starched-collar types. Unfortunately for the GOP, the successes of the rugged individualist persona that helped lead to his nomination were not ultimately a good fit with the much more middle-of-the-road and liberal frontier myth of the 1950s and early 1960s and the majority of American voters who adhered to it. Barry Goldwater’s own appeals to the “silent” Americans who went about their daily business without “demands for special treatment”—his “Platform for the Forgotten America”—seemed to many moderates as seriously compromised by his simultaneous strategy to woo white voters from the South with his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Goldwater also did not help himself at the Republican National Convention when he grimly declared that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” What’s more, once out on the campaign trail, his speeches seemed to lose their frontier foundations and came to more closely resemble, as Goldberg has put it, “Old Testament jeremiads.” LBJ’s campaign staff immediately recognized Goldwater’s cranky and out-of-touch persona and saddled up for the clash.[37]

The Democratic campaign worked overtime to portray LBJ as a responsible liberal cowpoke while dusting up his opponent, the reactionary senator Goldwater, as a bad man and crazy cowboy with his itchy finger on the nuclear trigger. One Democratic Party tract insisted, “Goldwater wants a ‘Showdown’—a duel between nuclear nations, and his own statements prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt.” The Republican candidate himself only fed into this kooky-cowboy image when he wrote, “In the Old West, the six-gun was called the equalizer; it made all men the same height and the same strength. The atom bomb and its offspring, the nuclear bomb, have become the six-guns of today’s world.”[38]

By early September, Special Assistant to the President Jack Valenti had advised Johnson by confidential memorandum on the course the presidential campaign should take. Valenti was blunt and animated, contending that “we ought to treat Goldwater not as an equal, who has credentials to be President, but as a radical, a preposterous candidate who would ruin our country and its future.” Valenti continued, “We ought to get some gag writers to destroy Goldwater. . . . We must make him ridiculous . . . trigger-happy, a bomb thrower.” Fellow special assistant Lawrence O’Brien echoed Valenti’s advice when he wrote to LBJ, “The Bomb is the biggest issue by far. Voters are frightened of Goldwater and don’t want him in the same room as the nuclear trigger.” Apparently LBJ agreed. Over the final months of the campaign, Goldwater was consistently portrayed by Democratic campaigners as a crazy right-wing kook and nuclear gunslinger who was grossly irresponsible, antipeace, anti–Social Security, anti-Medicare, and antigovernment. President Johnson himself delivered essentially the same message about his opponent but with a few LBJ enhancements borrowing heavily from the conventional wisdom of America’s frontier experience.[39]

In a speech given in Reno, Johnson employed his own high-road style of frontier imagery—emphasizing the needs of the frontier community and role of the federal government—to drive at what had now become the key message of his campaign, “responsibility”:

Here on the frontier of the West, the watchword has always been freedom. . . . We know how the West was won. It wasn’t won by men on horses who tried to settle every argument with a quick draw and a shot from the hip. We here in the West aren’t about to turn in our sterling-silver American heritage for a plastic credit card that reads, “Shoot now; pay later.” . . . We didn’t build this Nation by everyone scratching and clawing for himself. We built it, like we built the West, by pitching in together and by always acting responsibly. . . . “We the people” are going to stay in business and “we, the Government” are going to do together the things that we can’t do alone. One candidate is roaming around the country saying what a terrible thing the Government is. . . . Somebody better tell him that most Americans are not ready to trade the American eagle in for a plucked banty rooster. He better know that most people just don’t believe the United States Government is a foreign power or an enemy.

For LBJ, working together “responsibly” in an optimistic, community-minded milieu, with a little help from the federal government, would enable Americans to help preserve world peace and do more than they could do alone, bringing more personal freedom for the individual. The 1964 Democratic Party platform spoke of ending discrimination on the basis of race, age, sex, or national origin so that Americans not only had the “right to be free” but also would have “the ability to use their freedom.” Under the Bill of Rights, Johnson contended that Americans had more personal freedom in 1964 than they had ever had in the nation’s, or the world’s, history but that more needed to be done to reach the ultimate goal of equal opportunity and equal treatment for all Americans.[40] In making these statements, LBJ (and the Democratic Party platform) was tapping directly into a liberal, national frontier myth so deeply entrenched in American thinking that it did not need specific explanation. Here was more than a party platform, it was a national vision for the future—based on a legendary past—that was impervious to regionalism and its peculiar characteristics of segregation, unequal access to education, and even economic disparity.

In his remarks to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, the chairman of the Platform Committee, Carl Albert, employed this same forward-looking version of the frontier myth when he declared, “This is a progressive platform. This is a platform that profits from the past, but looks to the future. This is a Lyndon Johnson platform.” The optimistic future promised by LBJ versus the pessimistic past of Goldwater also appeared as a frame in the ’64 Democratic Party campaign literature. One pamphlet, “Why Rural America Needs Johnson-Humphrey,” told readers that if Goldwater were elected, the United States would be turning the clock back to America’s rural past: “And those who recall the past with its back-breaking labor, its inconvenience, its insecurity and its poverty of hope do not want this.” Happily, “man of the soil” LBJ would “continue to give the farmer his rightful place and rightful share in American society.” Throughout the race, Goldwater’s own words were used against him repeatedly and with great effectiveness to make the Arizonan appear as a callous dunce who voted against rural school lunch programs and uttered such statements as, “I’m not a farmer, and I don’t know anything about farming,” “I would get rid of the Agriculture Act,” and “I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow.”[41] Goldwater had failed to recognize the power of the mid-twentieth-century frontier myth as a great equalizer: with a little help from the federal government, the frontier through ranching and farming had given even impoverished folk the opportunity to pursue the American Dream of “making it” through hard work and a spirit of community and optimism for a brighter future. LBJ’s optimism, as opposed to Goldwater’s pessimism, was more faithful to an essential tenet of the frontier myth and worked heavily to the Democratic Party’s favor.

A plethora of evidence indicates that Johnson took every opportunity to be seen as an “American cowboy” and ranch man as he stole the thunder from Goldwater’s own rugged persona by riding his horses and rounding up cattle for the press, and donning his Stetson and shiny boots. So constant were his cowboy antics that LBJ’s conscious efforts seemed to border on the obsessive. Both Johnson and Goldwater disliked the media, but unlike his opponent, LBJ appears to have much better understood its power to persuade (and his own power, at this point, to persuade the press) as he launched the far more effective cowboy campaign. He even received help from some little cowhands. According to the Washington Post, “To children, the greatest Western hero since Hopalong Cassidy is President Lyndon B. Johnson.” Describing a new, preelection book by Bill Adler, Letters to the President, the Post reported that half of the twenty-five hundred letters that Johnson received from children each week referred to his western persona or his ranch. “To the kids,” Adler proclaimed, “he’s a cowboy.”[42] The shrewd and calculating Johnson, who had cut his teeth during the New Deal era of the 1930s and now wanted to “out-Roosevelt Roosevelt” (referring to FDR), also knew how to out-cowboy Goldwater by using his frontier-president image to full advantage.

Johnson’s ’64 presidential campaign at full gallop with campaign buttons declaring easterners from TR’s home state for the “reasonable” and forward-thinking cowboy, LBJ, versus his “trigger-happy,” “backward,” and regionalist opponent, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. (Images taken by the author at the LBJ Museum, Austin, Texas, 2011)

Barry Goldwater, meanwhile, did himself no favors. He failed to live up to the mid-1960s interpretation of the frontier myth by appearing less as a confident and optimistic western hero and more as a backward and unstable, conservative extremist who was out of touch with the times. To make matters worse for the Republicans, he did not seem to represent the entire nation, but rather, specific constituencies of ultraconservatives, Deep South white Democrats, and localized supporters in his home state of Arizona. The structure of the frontier myth at that point in time was quintessentially national in nature, inclusive, and positive, and appeared to offer a way forward for all Americans. Goldwater supporters and the Republicans of his day who backed his campaign did not understand this and, as a result, failed to deploy those elements of the myth that had been taken as a given. Goldwater’s campaign could not convince most of the public that he represented them, all regions of the country, or the public’s mostly optimistic visions for America’s future.

By contrast, for the rhetorical LBJ on the campaign trail in 1964, the people of the frontier had brought faith and light to the entire nation. He told a breakfast audience in Portland, Oregon, that he had flown across a continent in just a few hours to see them: “A continent it took decades of daring to conquer. It took brave men and strong men to make that crossing. But, most of all it took men of faith—men of great faith in themselves, in their country, in the future of this land.” The president continued,

The West is not just a place. It is an idea. The Bible says, “Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee.” And here, in the West, we learned man’s possibilities were as spacious as the sky that covered him. We learned that free men could build a civilization as majestic as the mountains and the rivers that nourished him. We learned that with our hands we could create a life that was worthy of the land that was ours. And that lesson has illuminated the life of all America—east, west, north and south.[43]

Johnson’s own rhetoric, in keeping with the nationalistic frontier myth and popular vision that the Old West encompassed all of the best that America had to offer, ignored the fact that much of the process he described also involved heavy-handed colonialism toward Native Americans, a grasping imperialist war with Mexico, and a number of nineteenth-century ideas of assimilation, progress, and faith in social evolution. But what mattered most to LBJ and his throngs of supporters was that America’s mythic past was still relevant to the world, provided that it was national in scope and being projected forward into the future. Furthermore, as Gerald Nash asserted in The American West in the Twentieth Century, the postwar West had become the trendsetter for the nation on issues ranging from race relations and immigration to the environment to technological innovation.[44] In the context of mid-1960s America and its faith in the liberal frontier myth, LBJ’s message of positive, progressive, forward-looking change resonated for most American voters—not Goldwater’s reactionary vision.

On November 3, 1964, Lyndon Johnson was elected to his first full term as president by winning the largest percentage of the popular vote in US history. While his Republican opponent in the campaign was a westerner who had attempted to assume political stances credited to the character of the American frontier, LBJ cleaned Goldwater’s plow and swept every state in the West except Arizona. Goldwater captured his own state by a margin of only 0.5 percent of the vote.[45]

A GREAT SOCIETY MANDATE AND THE FRONTIER MYTH AS SYMBOL FOR THE FUTURE

Johnson now had a mandate for his ambitious liberal programs. The structure of the frontier myth as a unifying national myth capable of explaining and answering America’s questions—essentially the same message that LBJ deployed—had dislodged the competing campaign of Goldwater and kicked off the most extensive program of liberal legislation since the New Deal. “The Great Society,” Johnson told the nation, “rests upon abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.” In keeping with the myth, LBJ was a kind of liberal nationalist, perceiving a broad consensus for a strong defense against external threats and for domestic programs that eased the problems that emerged with an advanced industrial society and reduced poverty and racism. Put simply, he was following the conventional frontier wisdom of his times—that government should be about improving its citizens’ lives. Johnson reaped the benefits of the myth with powerful public support. In January 1965, Gallup polls showed that 71 percent of the American public approved of LBJ’s performance as president, with a disapproval rate of just 15 percent: impressive figures in any era for a president already serving in his second year in office.[46]

“Where Seldom Is Heard a Discouraging Word.” Charles Brooks, Birmingham (AL) News, January 20, 1965. (Reproduced with permission of Barbara Brooks Bankhead)

In the foreword to the 1965 edition of Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers, President Johnson (or at least his White House speechwriters) presented what might have come closest to his own vision of the frontier myth and what it meant for the nation and his administration’s policies:

The American Frontier cannot properly be described in the past tense. The influence of the Frontier has been great upon our political institutions, our social patterns, our values and aspirations as a people, and, especially, upon the democratic character of our society. The influence of the Frontier as a molding force in our system is far from spent. . . .

“The West” is not so much a geographic place as it is a symbol—a symbol of America’s confidence that on beyond the moment, on beyond the present terrain, the world will be brighter, the future better. . . .

As we become a more populous and far more urbanized nation, an instinct develops—a right and just instinct—to preserve the heritage of the open country, the clear skies, clean streams. More importantly another instinct develops—an instinct to preserve the equality of opportunity, the dignity of the individual, the commitment to justice for all that derive from the spirit of the Frontier era. Our affluence, our abundance, our strength and power have not dulled the values experience taught us through the challenge of opening the Frontier. . . .

In the challenging and perilous times of this century, free men everywhere might consider the motto [of Texas Ranger captain L. H. McNelly] that “courage is a man who keeps coming on.” . . .

We cannot be sure that in our own time we will reach and fulfill the goals of our society or the ideals on which our system stands. But we can, by dedication and commitment, be the kind of people who “keep on coming on.”[47]

By recalling part of America’s history and quoting the nation’s heroes, presidents and politicians in general connect themselves with America’s past, with its mission, values, and goals. As LBJ characterized the nation in flattering western terms he was redefining his readers or audience as the kind of folks who have always supported the excellent ideas like those in his programs. The influence of the frontier, Johnson insists, would continue to sustain and shape the federal government and the nation’s values and democratic character. The West remains a symbol for a better and brighter future, and the “spirit of the frontier” an ongoing force for shaping Americans’ commitment to equality of opportunity, justice, and the dignity of individuals (distinct from emphasizing individualism in and of itself). Most of all, Americans must “keep coming on” not to preserve what was, but to meet modern challenges and work toward reaching goals and ideals of American society that have not yet been met.

In moving toward these goals and ideals, LBJ tied his western credentials and “lessons” from America’s pioneering days to his own administration and his rationales in 1964–66 for engineering the passage of more liberal, domestic legislation in a two-year period than any US president. According to the Johnsonian view, then, the values of the frontier myth were not a symbol of better times past but of preparing for better times ahead. This optimism for the future described by Ray Allen Billington as the myth’s most “outstanding feature” was already the accepted view of most Americans of the early 1960s who supported LBJ’s policies and then voted him back into office.

In the film shown at the LBJ Museum during the 2010s, Lyndon Baines Johnson: 36th President, this same message continued to be directed at viewers. The narrator describes the opening, serene shot of Johnson Country but then sets the tone for the “pioneering” section of the film by adding, “The gentle beauty of springtime in the Hill Country of Central Texas offered little warning of the harsh life awaiting early settlers.” Johnson’s western background and persona here and in his written accounts are depicted as having helped to define and promote the Great Society programs—which look to make life better for Americans than the tough existence of the past. Joseph Califano was later in awe of his former boss’s ambitions for the nation: “There was no child he could not feed, no adult he could not put to work, no disease he could not cure.” For Califano, LBJ’s forward-looking and optimistic domestic program was his gift to the nation. As this book also contends, it was a view derived from the nation’s culture and value system—as defined by the frontier myth—which promoted optimism, opportunity, and inclusiveness and meant driving forward with the kind of boldness and innovation that pioneering Americans, so the story told, had exhibited in the previous century. [48]

“WE SHALL OVERCOME”: COMMUNITY, CIVIL RIGHTS AND INCLUSIVENESS

The frontier structure had gained its most influential adherent of the 1960s in Lyndon Baines Johnson. In the president’s pronouncements, the environment had forced old customs to conform to new realities—and so it would be for American society of the late twentieth century. And like any good master explanation for American development, LBJ’s touchstone seemed to account for past and future.

As implied in his foreword to The Texas Rangers, for Johnson, meeting the challenges of future frontiers also meant promoting an agenda of cooperation, community, a democratic spirit, equal opportunity, tolerance, civil rights, and immigration: the more inclusive shades of the frontier myth. At a fundraising dinner in New Orleans, he told his audience, “The years have been long. The trials have been many. The burdens have been great. But the times are beginning to respond to America’s steadfast purpose. . . . The platform on which I stand says: ‘The Federal Government exists not to grow larger, but to enlarge the individual potential and achievement of the people.’” He also stated, “We are not going to lose [our vision of] tomorrow in divisions over things of the past.” Breaking from his prepared text, LBJ then went for the jugular of the southern segregationists right on their home turf, asserting, “Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none. . . . [This] is no time to preach division or hate. If there was ever a time for us to try to unite and find areas of agreement, it is now.” The president added, “It is time for us to have a little trust and a little faith in each other, and to try to find some areas that we can agree on so we can have a united program . . . and do what is right.”[49] No president addressing a Deep South crowd in person had ever spoken in such terms.

LBJ also told audiences at speaking engagements and in televised addresses that the “purpose of democracy is fulfillment for every individual.” The abundance of opportunity, meanwhile, was to his mind what made the United States exceptional in relation to other countries. Relatedly the term “frontier” continued to mean a place to be discovered and a place of opportunity. Today, LBJ liked to say, “Something is happening which is as exciting—even more exciting—than the winning of the West.” Then he would go on to describe one of his Great Society programs such as Medicare or aid to education, or laws guaranteeing the equality of the nation’s citizens. The president would usually remind his listeners that those afraid to take this new pioneering journey or who claimed it was “too expensive” would not be dealt with kindly in the history books. Like the early settlers who “built a new world out of the wilderness,” Americans had to stay the course. LBJ likened his wide-ranging liberal programs to a new “great age of exploration” that would prove even more glorious an accomplishment than that of Americans’ ancestors in the previous century. But to reach the promised land, Americans would need to come along on the journey with him.[50]

In what was perhaps LBJ’s most lauded message to Congress—on March 15, 1965—he came out strongly in support of voting rights for African Americans. Johnson told the American public: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.”[51] LBJ was determined to achieve a solid and sweeping national civil rights bill and to defeat the “enemies” of America’s past: racism, poverty, ignorance, and disease. Driven by his dream of ending the Civil War for good; his belief in a national, not a regional, vision; and inclinations about the equality of men, Johnson went for broke—quoting directly from a key anthem of the American civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.” The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the most outstanding accomplishments of his career, and Johnson owed much of his success to his mobilization of the frontier myth. Along the way, Lyndon Johnson frequently peppered his speeches with stories of western heroism in urging “all-American” equal rights—not just those featuring Anglo-Saxon types. On several occasions, he read from the roster of the Battle of the Alamo, “the Lexington and Concord west of the Mississippi,” where the name of a black man who died there was mentioned alongside those who were at least part Irish, German, or Spanish.[52] Through such stories, Johnson achieved another presidential first, acknowledging and promoting the heroic role of minorities in the popularly perceived “winning of the West.” LBJ’s reforms and programs—buoyed by the “spirit of the frontier” and its demands for equality on a national scale in his own mind and in the minds of millions of Americans in all regions—were sweeping.

GUN CONTROL

As Brian Dippie, Rush Welter, and other cultural historians have argued, the power of myth to explain as well as shape events and policies is key to our understanding of America’s past. Lyndon Johnson not only emphasized his own connections to the frontier experience and common folk, along with “real-life heroes” to promote his ambitious programs and social reforms, he garnered support from Hollywood western movie, TV, and radio stars “to get the word out.” In one example from the final year of the Johnson presidency, Charlton Heston, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and Hugh O’Brian (star of TV’s long-running The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp) all actively worked with the Johnson administration in passing the 1968 Gun Control Act. White House special counsel Larry Levinson sent a memo on June 12, 1968, to a speechwriter, stating, “At the President’s suggestion, Jack Valenti has agreed to hold a luncheon in Los Angeles . . . June 17, at which a number of famous movie actors—particularly those who played cowboys—will speak out in favor of the President’s gun legislation. . . . We need two pithy, one-page statements which will be read by two of the cowboys (probably Charlton Heston . . . ), supporting the President’s Gun Control Bill.” A few days later the “cowboys” read the same prepared statement to a nationwide TV audience on the Joey Bishop Show, and in a letter to Special Assistant Joseph Califano, PR man Dick McKay wrote that “Charlton, Gregory and Hugh personally planted this statement with the bureau chiefs at AP and UPI.” The considerable publicity generated by these celluloid lawmen in the waning days of the myth’s influence helped the president secure passage of the bill.[53]

THE NEW CONSERVATION

Reminiscent of TR and prior to LBJ’s pivoting toward American involvement in Vietnam, the president threw the full force of his tremendous energy into the preservation and protection of public lands. In perhaps his most quoted statement on the issue leading up to the 1964 election, Johnson said, “We have always prided ourselves on not only being America the strong, America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded. Our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.” In early February 1965 he called for a “New Conservation,” a program that resulted in the creation of twelve task forces to address environment problems and ultimately the signing into law of almost three hundred conservation and beautification measures (more than any other president) at a cost of over $12 billion. By 1966 LBJ boasted that for the first time the United States was saving more land than it was losing to development, and during his five-year presidency, recreation on public lands tripled.[54]

Johnson’s New Conservation program called for a national effort and echoed many of the rejuvenating rationales for preserving the wilderness that were claimed in Theodore Roosevelt’s day. In the Honolulu Advertiser the editor responded to the new program by describing at length how LBJ and Stewart Udall were the “spiritual descendants” of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, and that it was in this context that Johnson’s conservation message should best be viewed. Even TR’s and LBJ’s language, the Advertiser insisted, were similar. Both called for a coordinated, many-fronted effort to rescue the “beauty and quality of the continent we have conquered—perhaps over-conquered.”[55]

But LBJ’s administration went beyond the conservation philosophy of TR’s day by emphasizing those mid-twentieth-century aspects of the frontier myth that highlighted the need of the community, both rural and urban, to meet their obligations to future generations. LBJ explained that this modern, forward-thinking conservation needed to go further than the “classic conservation” of the past, encompassing not only the countryside but cities and the man-made environment as well. Once again, LBJ appealed to the nation’s conscience and suggested that only by meeting and expanding on past ideals can the needs and goals for the future be met. “For centuries, Americans have drawn strength and inspiration from the beauty of our country.” This generation, LBJ insisted, needed to live up to its historical and national responsibility to “preserve and extend such a heritage for its descendants.”[56] Traditionally, conservation had been a means of increasing the power of the federal government; as a result, the issues of economic growth versus natural scenery, private versus public rights, and states’ versus federal rights were always at the heart of the debates over the history of the program. The momentum of the Johnson presidency on the New Conservation would still carry some weight during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years. As we shall see, though, conservation initiatives would face serious opposition during the Reagan presidency—after a tumultuous series of events caused the frontier myth to shift sharply to the right.

THE FINAL FRONTIER

Following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson exploited the sluggish response of the Eisenhower administration and became the nation’s leading political spokesperson on outer space for more than a decade—delivering forty speeches on the subject between 1957 and 1962 alone. The Soviets had aroused some of Americans’ deepest fears and anxieties during the postwar era. As the Reverend Billy Graham told Americans at an evangelical rally in 1953, “Almost all ministers of the gospel and students of the Bible agree that it [communism] is master-minded by Satan himself.” The success of Sputnik only intensified Americans’ desire to rise to the challenge of the westering mission to spread frontier values and counter those of the “Red Menace” (the very antithesis of Americanism). In the minds of many Americans who had lived through the first two decades of the Cold War, the political, cultural, and spiritual canyon separating the experience of the American frontier from the Soviet East stretched as far as the imagination could reach.[57]

Not surprisingly then, many of LBJ’s own pronouncements combined anti-Soviet imagery with frontier themes. Senator Johnson expressed his deep concern that in allowing Russia to get ahead of the United States in space, his own nation had faltered in “an American specialty from the beginning—pioneering.” Tapping into Americans’ fears about their hated enemy and the future, Johnson proclaimed in 1958, “Outer space will be explored. It will become the domain of free men or of men whose minds are enslaved. Either we meet our responsibilities or abdicate to totalitarianism the dimension which will shape the lives of the coming generations.” Less than four years later, Vice President Johnson had some good news for the American public when he announced that returning astronaut John Glenn had “ridden a covered wagon across the frontier of space” after successfully orbiting the Earth. The following year, in 1963, when asked by a member of the press if it was worth spending enormous amounts of money required to fund the Apollo missions, Johnson described the ominous alternative: “The question is which kind of philosophy, democratic or Communist, will dominate outer space? I for one don’t want to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon.” Rather, Johnson intended to rope in the man on the moon himself. On one of his visits to the ranch, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Dr. Wernher von Braun, was handed a Stetson by President LBJ and told “to put it on the moon by 1970.”[58]

During the troubled second half of Johnson’s presidency, when the TV show Star Trek challenged viewers each week to imagine future visits to “space: the final frontier,” LBJ persisted with his wagon-train-to-the-stars speech-making. The Star Trek series explained repeatedly how human society had evolved from its past of warfare, ecological destruction, and racism into a better future society of tolerance, self-determination, and peace under the United Federation of Planets. The series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry, had been head writer for the 1950s TV western Have Gun Will Travel, before he sold NBC executives the rights to a kind of “wagon train to the stars.”[59] Johnson described his hopes for the future in similar terms—provided that Americans, like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, would be willing, in effect, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Referring to Sputnik ten years after its launch, LBJ reflected that Americans were comparatively “backward because we did not choose adventure. We did not choose to have vision. We did not choose to look forward.” Competing demands of the Vietnam War and the war on poverty would compel Johnson to remind listeners that America had made tremendous strides during the 1960s and that “the great pilgrimage of man—like all adventures—costs money. . . . We will not abandon our dream. We will never evacuate the frontiers of space to any other nation. We just must be the space pioneers who lead the way to the stars.” Americans, as Johnson had been saying for years, were the world’s greatest pioneers—and in each instance of the experience, from New England to California and now into space, “The single greatest effect has been upon our political institutions and political concepts.”

Here LBJ, as in his introduction to The Texas Rangers, is in tune with Frederick Jackson Turner on the frontier’s greatest benefit: the democratic spirit. In a commentary that seemed to combine the ideas of Turner and Roddenberry, Johnson added, “As we found our national character in the frontiers of the American West, so, I believe, we can recapture our confidence and fulfill our greatness in the frontiers of the universe and beyond the atmosphere. . . . We are moving to extend the frontiers of freedom—personal freedom, social freedom, economic freedom, and the freedom from the liberation of war.” These themes appeared again in a special message to Congress, this time with Johnson quoting directly from the Turner thesis itself: “‘Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people. . . .’ This represents a valid exposition of the vitality of our democratic process as it has endured for almost two hundred years.” For the president, America remained an exceptional nation and the most democratic society on earth due to its frontiering experience—adapting and changing as its people moved outward first across the frontier West, then out to the Pacific, and now into outer space, all the while adapting to change and becoming freer, fairer, more inclusive, and more democratic. For Turner and LBJ, political democracy was central to American distinctiveness, and the frontiering experience, more than anything else, fostered democracy. But for Johnson, it seemed, America’s frontiers were limitless.[60]

Again and again, Lyndon Johnson’s policy focus was consistently on the future, not the past. Repeatedly, Johnson claimed that technological innovation (especially as it related to the space program) would be what preserves American lives and freedoms. “American soul and American genius is big enough to conquer all obstacles,” he would say, “and this is what we shall and must do.” Johnson, then, possessed a similar optimistic mind-set that his contemporary, New Turnerian Ray Allen Billington, had identified as “the outstanding feature of the frontier thesis.” In accordance with the frontier myth, “can-do” Americans with their “masterful grasp of material things” would prove themselves capable of meeting any challenge. Outer space, Johnson liked to say, was the New World of the next five hundred to a thousand years as “men will be as deeply impelled toward space exploration as the men of the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were to explore the Western Hemisphere. . . . Freedom as we know it would not have come into existence, and certainly would not have survived, without the opening of this great new frontier on earth.” The implication was clear: as with the American frontier, pioneering in space would enable democracy and freedom to endure, defeat, or at least contain the Soviets, and change the rules and responsibilities of government for the better.[61] LBJ’s most enduring priority, sending an American to the moon ahead of the Soviets, never wavered, and six months after he left office that goal was reached.

Tellingly, Johnson’s fascination with space flight and pioneering appears to have manifested itself in his own personal efforts to fuse modern technology with the Old West. The LBJ Ranch blended a rural world that represented the frontier image of an older America with a host of modern conveniences. Along with more than two hundred registered brood cows and calves, four bulls, a flock of sheep and goats, numerous hogs, and about one dozen horses and ponies, the ranch featured an enormous communications tower replete with satellite dishes, canned Muzak piped through LBJ’s home and five live oak trees beyond it, his personal JetStar aircraft, a custom-fitted Sikorsky helicopter, a mile-long airstrip with LBJ’s pure-bred Herefords grazing alongside, an eighteen-foot speedboat, twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser, a white Lincoln Continental convertible with a specially rigged electric “cattlehorn,” Corvettes, an Amphicar, more than a dozen color TVs, thirty two-way radio sets, a three-hundred-plus-foot radio tower, video and audio reel-to-reel tape machines, and seventy telephones (six phone outlets were placed conveniently around his heated pool, and one even underneath the dining room table). Like LBJ himself, the ranch reflected the past but also looked forward to and seized newness and change. The president believed that “his people” had been victorious in their conquest of the continent; perhaps for Johnson the ultimate triumph was to experience the mysteries of the sublime Pedernales River country in comfort. LBJ’s emphasis on new technologies to resolve problems out west certainly resonated with the views of University of Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb, whom VP Johnson had appointed as the premier historian of the ninety-eighth meridian. LBJ, arguably, used such gimmicks in an effort to appeal to voters and build cordial relationships with foreign leaders through creating his own image as the nation’s number-one high-tech cowboy. But just as significantly, it was consistent with the mid-twentieth-century interpretations of the frontier myth that blended the nation’s past heritage with its hopes for future sustained progress.[62] For most Americans, science and technology itself were frontiers.

President Johnson and Vice President–elect Hubert Humphrey in front of Marine One at the LBJ Ranch, November 4, 1964. (Courtesy LBJ Library, Photo No. 436-253-WH64)

LBJ: COWBOY COLOSSUS

In terms of his personality, LBJ seemed to epitomize Turner’s famous line about the “typical” American frontiersman who was said to be “lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends.” Johnson was the consummate DC political power player who could get things done for the folks back home, but he also possessed a western frontier style to which many Americans could relate and see in themselves. Though in the thick of beltway politics he was also viewed and admired as a maverick: a genuine colossal presence reminiscent of Wister’s Virginian, though markedly less subtle. Historian Robert Caro has vividly described the overwhelming force of Johnson’s character. When on the floor as Senate majority leader, Johnson tended his herd, “prowl[ing] the big chamber restlessly, moving up and down the aisles, back and forth along the rows of desks. . . . Moving over to a senator seated at a desk, and then to another, he would sit down beside a man or bend over him, sometimes with both his arms planted firmly on the target’s desk, so that he could not rise and get away.” In the apt words of one journalist, Lyndon Baines Johnson was “the Western movie barging into the room.”[63]

Unlike President Reagan, “the Great Communicator,” who would have handlers, Johnson, “the Great Persuader,” had advisers—most of whom were handled by LBJ himself. Tom Wicker of the New York Times observed in “Lyndon Johnson Is 10 Feet Tall” that LBJ’s western “nature” was the reason he loomed over his administration: “the breezy, two-fisted, overpower range king who rules from horizon to horizon and from can-see to can’t-see with iron will and fast gun. Lyndon Johnson,” Wicker quipped, “may be the best John Wayne part ever written.” Like TR, LBJ believed in the bully pulpit—always teaching, preaching, writing, pleading, complaining, “always coming on.” In his first two years in office, LBJ had pushed through Congress laws that had overthrown legal segregation in the South, gained southern blacks the right to vote, created Medicare and Medicaid, and moved to bring substantive new protections to the nation’s environment. LBJ wielded power in a way that few presidents, including certainly his predecessor, ever had. And his frontier mannerisms and all-American, cowboy colossus image, whether deliberate or not, had arguably played a significant role in his ability to garner from across the country tremendous support for his programs.[64] But the frontier-myth structure he had been shaped by and on which he relied so heavily for his political success was about to undergo a series of serious challenges. And as events caused the myth to lose its power and influence, Johnson too, in the second phase of his presidency, found that his own undeniable strong suit—the power to persuade—would begin to elude him.

The ideas of the first cowboy president, Theodore Roosevelt, were used in many ways as a basic template for President Lyndon Johnson to follow in his updated interpretation and deployment of the frontier myth in domestic policies. In the years leading up to his presidency, LBJ and his staff worked hard to cut his image loose from its backward-thinking southern connections and promote a new western, frontier-of-the-future persona that would win over the nation. For the most part, this shrewdness served Johnson remarkably well in helping him win the presidency overwhelmingly in his own right against the conservative cowboy Goldwater in 1964, and in promoting a frontier-inspired liberal agenda for the mid-1960s.

Like TR, Lyndon Johnson thought big. During the first half of his presidency, LBJ committed the bulk of his energies toward bringing greater equality of opportunity to all Americans and increasing the emphasis on community through promotion of his liberal programs. For Johnson the forward-looking frontier myth was a catalyst for creating his Great Society, establishing civil rights for minorities, and exploring outer space. Johnson deployed the frontier imagery as a medium for communicating a message that drew on the past to explain the future and to create a future that was impervious to the regional characteristics that had previously facilitated such nonprogressive characteristics as southern segregation, unequal access to education, economic despair, and state control over the nation’s wilderness heritage. The president cast himself, and was projected as, “a man of the land” who would lead all Americans to a “better and brighter” future by carrying on the tradition of his pioneering ancestors who had worked so hard to build up infrastructures that would make life better for their own children and future generations. Johnson aimed to be the most successful progressive president of the twentieth century. The “restless optimism of the man,” as one admiring observer put it, and Johnson’s own oft-repeated belief that “can-do” Americans could rise to any challenge, tapped into that same kind of optimism that Ray Allen Billington had identified in the 1950s as the outstanding feature of the frontier myth. Until mid-1965 this approach appears to have worked well for LBJ, in part, as this study contends, because events of this period reinforced, or at least worked within, the parameters of the myth. Johnson called for much more government intervention and projected frontier imagery forward in time to create what he hoped would be a nation free from the pioneer struggles of the past with its vexing poverty and discrimination. In terms of legislation no president before or since made a greater effort to be inclusive in supporting the poor and minorities, leveling the playing field of opportunity for all Americans, and preserving the nation’s parklands for future generations. Being “on the people’s side” in terms of domestic programs remained, in Johnson’s mind, a priority of his administration, and he consciously summed up the domestic, liberal victories in Congress in frontier terms: proudly referring to them as his “showdowns for progress.” His promotion of space exploration, meanwhile, was bolstered by the belief that outer space exploration would continue to stoke that “socio-cultural furnace” (the frontier) from which American democracy was forged. The frontier myth of the mid-twentieth century and early Johnson years with its philosophy of liberal democracy, selflessness, and community had become so deeply entrenched as a structure of American society that most Americans accepted many of these ideas—even without specific explanation. But just as it seemed destined to reach its zenith, the myth of the frontier as a thesis of liberalism and inclusion was about to begin toppling over a cliff.[65]

An acceleration of events, including a major war on the other side of the world in Southeast Asia, and the eruption of violence and rapid social change at home, would throttle many Americans’ assumptions about Johnson and the frontier myth. As we explore in the next chapter, a series of explosive developments, occurring both inside and outside the United States (and worsened still by a growing public distrust of the cowboy colossus, Johnson himself), would combine to destroy the frontier myth consensus and turn the myth increasingly against LBJ’s administration and many of its programs. In the process, these events would prevent or seriously undermine Johnson’s efforts to bring some of his progressive vision of the frontier myth forward into the latter decades of the twentieth century and beyond.

Chapter 3

MYTH IN A QUAGMIRE

VIETNAM AND LBJ’S SECOND PRESIDENCY

Hell, Vietnam is just like the Alamo. . . . Well, by God, I’m going to go—and I thank the Lord that I’ve got the men who want to go with me, from McNamara right on down to the littlest private who’s carrying a gun.

—President Johnson to the National Security Council, 1965

In many aspects of his presidency, Lyndon Johnson would have done much better had he followed the old West African proverb often quoted by his hero Theodore Roosevelt: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” The frontier image that served LBJ so well as he transferred from the Senate through the vice presidency and into the early years in the White House began to turn sour on him in his “second presidency.” From 1963 to 1965 Johnson had taken on some of the nation’s largest domestic problems like a bronco buster, but along with initiating some remarkable and innovative achievements, from 1966 onward his efforts would be overtaken by a series of tragic events. The frontier myth had shaped LBJ’s own expectations for himself as president and how he viewed America’s “mission” in the world; it had also shaped the media’s and public’s expectations of success for their president and how he would achieve it. During his first term in office, the frontier myth had provided an adequate and powerful narrative for Lyndon Johnson’s programs and policies at home and abroad. But Johnson’s own strict adherence to the liberal frontier myth structure—one encompassing optimism in dealing with any problem or challenge, promoting American democracy and social change at home and abroad, and presuming inevitable progress—proved incapable of explaining and accommodating the tumultuous events of 1966–69.

The failed experience of Vietnam and plethora of national crises that swept over the nation from the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s would bring about a collapse of the liberal nationalist frontier myth. During this watershed period, Americans experienced failure to bring democracy to and produce a frontierlike victory in Southeast Asia, a wave of domestic race riots and assassinations, the growing “credibility gap” between the presidency and the public, a severe economic decline, the humiliations of the Iranian hostage crisis, and a perceived economic shellacking at the hands of a resurgent Japan. These events taken together created a kind of avalanche of perceived national failures, causing the entire frontier mythic structure to change course in the span of just over a decade. As a result, the myth’s structure would buckle under LBJ, recede during the 1970s, and ultimately hinge back outward in the 1980s, enabling the structure to be reformed and advance a radically different political agenda. Marshall Sahlins has reminded us that all social structures, such as the frontier myth, have occasionally faced crises so disruptive that events could not be fully explained by the tenets embodied in the structures. Here is a profound case in point. Unable to deny the importance of the events of this watershed era, Americans’ powerful frontier vision would radically change its emphasis away from its ideology of liberal progressivism into a temporary hiatus during the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, and finally be resurrected in 1980 as a key symbol of the conservative “Reagan Revolution.”

JOHNSON’S WAR AS A POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE

The Vietnam War dominated Johnson’s second presidency and challenged the explanatory power of the frontier myth in ways that no other event had. The military engagement in this distant part of the world would prove his largest mistake and, arguably, the worst foreign policy disaster to date in American history. Much of Johnson’s own rationale for the war was based on frontier-myth assumptions that, in the end, seriously hampered the administration’s options and flexibility. The world was shifting and Johnson, like American society in general, struggled to make sense of a rapidly changing planet where people wondered if the old rules and assumptions still applied. The structure strained under the challenges posed by the events of the later 1960s, each seeking to give new meaning to the other. LBJ believed that the frontier myth, provided it was applied in a forward-looking fashion (as had been the case in domestic affairs) rather than a nostalgic and backward-looking one, remained relevant at home and abroad. But the inherent obligations that gave meaning to the frontier myth fed into what would become known as the tragedy of “Johnson’s war” in Southeast Asia and ultimately tore into the existing interpretations of the myth and brought about his own ruin. The final year of cowboy Johnson’s presidency, 1968, was nothing less than a “political earthquake” that would change the cultural landscape of the nation. The frontier myth would face a series of crises so disruptive that it could no longer be invoked to explain the events taking place at home or abroad.[1]

TROUBLE AT CREDIBILITY GAP

Since his early days in Congress, LBJ’s actions indicated that he felt the need to persuade the press to become his supporters and even his partisans. As president, Johnson manipulated individual journalists, carving out a special relationship with those who reported what he wanted. But over time his relationship with journalists became increasingly strained. LBJ had entered the presidency just when the media were beginning to put politicians under a more intense spotlight; Johnson frequently made things much more difficult for himself by noticeably distorting the truth. As the print media fought with television to retain market share, journalists became more and more analytical and critical—going beyond merely reporting the day’s events. Regarding frontier freedoms (such as the freedom of information) as something for himself but not for the American nation as a whole, Johnson had hoped to have direct control over and be the dispenser of government information, just as many of his predecessors had done. But along the way, he sometimes misled reporters to gain favorable news stories or to avoid open explanations of his policies. In the new media milieu of the 1960s, this approach backfired.

LBJ was so confident of America’s frontier mission in the world that he behaved as if the ends justified the means. This attitude hastened the collapse of the frontier-myth structure that had previously served him so well. A more aggressive and critical approach by the media required greater openness and honesty on the part of the president, but by his second term in office LBJ’s own penchant for relating falsehoods was exposed, enhancing the increasingly apparent mismatch between his actions and related events in the world, and the relevance of the frontier myth to explain them.

What became publicly known as President Johnson’s “credibility gap,” a term first used in 1965 by the New York Herald Tribune, contributed more and more to a decline in LBJ’s relations with the press and ultimately in the public’s trust in their president. Reporters discovered that the mythic Johnson was not as poor a youth as he had claimed, that he bent rules to amass his fortune, and that a number of his public statements—such as the alleged size of the 1964 budget and reports of successes and predictions for victory in Vietnam—seemed to reek of exaggeration or were simply false. Hugh Sidey cited another famous example: “A former Johnson aide tells how LBJ as a Senator was pointing out a ramshackle cabin on his Texas ranch which he described in Lincolnesque detail as his birthplace. Johnson’s mother was along on the ride, and when her son finished she mildly admonished him, ‘Why Lyndon, you know you were born in a much better house closer to town which has been torn down.’ The listener reports that Johnson replied, ‘I know, Mama, but everybody has to have a birthplace.’”[2]

In 1965 Johnson committed the first US combat troops to Vietnam, almost two hundred thousand soldiers, and this number rose steadily until troop levels reached more than half a million three years later. At the outset, number-crunching defense secretary Robert McNamara was convinced that victory could be achieved by Christmas 1965. But as the Vietnam War dragged on through 1966 and 1967, without any end in sight, Johnson’s popularity declined and the rules of the presidential-media relationship changed markedly. Throughout the country, optimism was being replaced by cynicism about the quality of the nation’s leadership and about American society in general. Johnson’s mind-set did not help the situation since he viewed reporters who no longer offered favorable comments about him or his administration’s policies as treasonous. He also suffered from the fact that more and more Americans were no longer judging him on his statements or his policies but on the lack of consistency between them. LBJ was slipping away from the narrative structures of the frontier myth; apparently, LBJ had never felt that his friend Gene Autry’s Third Cowboy Commandment, “A cowboy always tells the truth,” applied to him. Robert Caro reported that dishonesty was not a new practice of LBJ’s and that even in his younger days Lyndon had been given the public nickname “Bull.” A former classmate of Johnson’s, Edward Peils, explained why: “Because of his constant braggadocio. Because he was so full of bullshit, manure that people didn’t believe him. Because he was a man who could just not tell the truth.”[3]

Once the narrative structures of the frontier myth were confronted by the stark and harsh realities of the Vietnam War—which by 1965 had begun entering American living rooms on nightly newscasts—the public soon forgot about the achievements of the Great Society. The vague and abstract qualities of the frontier or western myth still encompassed and described many of Johnson’s domestic initiatives but could not be used to justify the outright falsehoods and dissembling brought out by the failing of Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. Simultaneously the credibility gap, LBJ’s presenting of half-truths to gain political advantage, caused his good ol’ cowpoke persona to wear dangerously thin.

An early Vietnam War protest poster cleverly linking LBJ’s “crude and rude” Hill Country behaviors with his decision to send American combat troops to Southeast Asia. (Vic Dinnerstein, “He Who Meddles in a Quarrel Not His Own,” c. 1965, offset poster. Reprinted with permission of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

THE FRONTIER FIGHT OF VIETNAM AS A HISTORICAL EVENT

America’s Vietnam experience is typically spoken of as a policy quagmire that spanned more than a decade and ultimately tied LBJ to a tragic legacy that would overwhelm his outstanding legislative record. Missing from this interpretation has been the recognition that the war was also a historical event so profoundly disruptive that it transformed the receptiveness of the American public to the long-standing frontier mythology—and this disconnect of the myth from the popular consciousness is my focus in this chapter.

Johnson’s decision to drastically escalate the US military’s commitment to South Vietnam in its fight with the Communist North was in large part a product of his adherence to the significance and “lessons” of the frontier experience. As Ronnie Dugger pointed out, Johnson was well aware that his own family had fought it out in the frontier environment of a Texas Hill Country rife with feuding and revenge. After a Vietcong attack on US soldiers at Pleiku in early 1965, LBJ insisted that his decision to initiate the bombing of North Vietnam was in “retaliation.” Before long, though, he announced that this bombing, dubbed “Operation Rolling Thunder,” would continue indefinitely. “Sending President Johnson a telegram to stop the bombing,” wrote Dugger, “was asking a Hatfield to stop killing the McCoys.” Johnson further fit the Vietnam War into the discourse of the frontier myth by characterizing the conflict as a kind of struggle between cowboys and Indians, “good” and “evil.” The president pontificated that American troops should fight the Reds on the frontier to save the “decent” people and civilize, in time, the Vietcong “savages.” It was a repeat or continuation of the long process of civilization-versus-savagery, only this time the frontier fight was taking place in the jungles and rice paddies of Indochina. LBJ relished the danger and romance of the American frontier in the lives of his own ancestors. He and his daughter, Lynda Bird, were once photographed visiting the cellar where his grandmother Eliza Bunton hid with her baby during an Indian raid in the Texas Hill Country. Like many Americans in the mid-twentieth century, he longed to recover the lost possibility of heroic achievement that the West seemed to have embodied.[4]

As the war in Vietnam escalated in the second phase of his presidency, however, LBJ came under increasing attacks from antiwar protesters, columnists, and editorial cartoonists who no longer viewed the frontier mythologies as capable of explaining and guiding American society—and by extension saw LBJ as a reckless, hapless, and bullying cowboy. Cartoonists who had once portrayed Johnson’s persona in terms of an optimistic, innovative, and humorous liberal figure now increasingly drew the frontier president as a crude, befuddled, and ruthless chief executive pursuing a lost cause.[5] The Vietnam draft had proven unpopular from the start in part because the war was being fought far away from America’s own shores, was not well understood, and there had never been a formal declaration of war. As opinion about the conflict itself became increasingly divided this hostility only grew. The president, meanwhile, used frontier logic to try to convince himself and the public that he could successfully conduct both the war in Vietnam overseas and the war on poverty at home. Johnson later explained his position to Doris Kearns: “I was determined to be a leader of war and a leader of peace. I wanted both, believed in both, and I believed America had the resources to provide for both. After all, our country was built by pioneers who had a rifle in one hand to kill their enemies and an ax in the other to build their home and provide for their families.” Ultimately, Johnson’s personal adherence to the frontier myth of sky’s-the-limit prosperity would play a tragic role in the fate of the nation and cause much of his own political undoing (see figure adjacent).[6]

Blaine, Hamilton (ON) Spectator, Canada. (Courtesy of Ildiko Horvath)

In the realm of international relations—never Johnson’s strong suit—the president’s sly personal cynicism, conniving, and determination to prevail at the bargaining tables did not prevent him from buying into some prevailing American myths. To LBJ—the self-reliant, independent cowboy of destiny—meeting challenges was part of the nation’s heritage. There was a workable solution to every problem, and Americans were an inherently can-do people who possessed the know-how to accomplish anything they willed, just as he had (LBJ, the kid from the hardscrabble, tough Texas outback, pointed out repeatedly how he had risen to the most powerful position in the Free World). All problems, Johnson devoutly believed, had solutions: America had conquered the Indians on the frontier, overcame the Depression, and beaten the Germans and their thuggish allies in two world wars. The nation was pounding away at racial discrimination, had risen “above” European nations to become the world’s number-one industrial giant, and was now meeting the challenge of the future to explore outer space. Americans were God’s chosen people: Why else, in Johnson’s view, would they have become what he believed to be the richest, strongest, and fiercest people in history? America was exceptional, just as the frontier West story had claimed—the most wonderful place on earth (it was, since LBJ had the evidence of himself and his ranch to prove it)—and as such, like the cowboy who saves the helpless, LBJ had the obligation to export its greatness to the less fortunate.

Using Hill Country talk, Johnson declared more than once, “If you let a bully come into your front yard, the next day he’ll be up on your porch, and the day after that he’ll rape your wife in your own bed.” Johnson’s bully analogies combined with his Indian raid stories and the American experience in World War II and Korea all reinforced his belief that history had proven the folly of appearing weak in the face of an aggressor, and by extension demonstrated his belief in the interpretive power of the frontier myth, with its simple definitions of right and wrong and the stark choices that guided frontier figures. LBJ scholars such as Thomas A. Bailey and Robert Dallek have attested that this president believed in God, greatness, goodness, and gunpowder. Hugh Sidey reported that on a top-secret visit to Cam Ranh Bay on October 26, 1966, President Johnson faced his field commanders at the officers’ club and shouted over the noisy ceiling fans, “I thank you, I salute you, may the good Lord look over you and keep you until you come home with the coonskin on the wall.” If victory was what was needed to end the war, then Johnson was telling them to go out there and win. After all, when a bully (North Vietnam) ragged you, LBJ explained to friends, you did not go off whining. Instead, like Daniel Boone, the Texas Rangers, TR, and countless other frontier western heroes, you gave him a good dose of his own medicine.[7]

Cultural and frontier historians point out that Lyndon Johnson’s background in the Hill Country instilled in him a foreign relations mentality that, beyond a certain point, a punch in the nose beats talk—and for Johnson this applied as much to foreign relations as it did to individual American personal relations. LBJ was born and raised in the heart of the violent Hill Country region of central Texas, and this characteristic of his homeland, along with its poverty, helped shape his presidential attitudes and values. According to Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, “Nowhere was frontier violence in America so bloody, or so protracted, as on the soil of Texas. . . . The Mexican-Indian warfare, taken together, spawned an almost incredible amount of violence. . . . Because of this history, the dominant Texas viewpoint was not that Texans settled Texas, but they conquered it.” Walter Prescott Webb wrote, meanwhile, that the battle of the Pedernales—occurring in the vicinity of Johnson City and the LBJ Ranch—“has good claims to being the first battle in which the six-shooter was used on mounted Indians.” In the spring of 1844, Webb added, Texas Rangers riding out of San Antonio and into the Hill Country shot down more than thirty “marauding” Indians with Samuel Colt’s remarkable new weapon. Lyndon Johnson’s pride in his no-duty-to-retreat heritage was reflected in his relentless determination to defend what he believed to be American interests in South Vietnam. During the congressional campaign in 1966 he told crowds in Des Moines that “the American people have never left any ally in a fight. And we do not intend to abandon South Vietnam now.” Johnson’s decision to bomb North Vietnam and commit large-scale land forces to the region in 1965 was also justified in part through his personal infatuation with the gunfighting Texas Ranger, Captain L. H. McNelly, and related declaration to the American public that “courage is a man who keeps coming on.” “And that’s what we do in Vietnam,” he once told Clark Clifford, “just keep on a-coming.” The Communists did not respect anything but force; you had to let them know who had the biggest guns, the quickest draw, and the toughest heart. The tradition of the Texas frontier spirit and of the Alamo that respected physical combat when challenged was a cultural environment that, if LBJ is to be taken at his own word, strongly influenced his attitude toward the Vietnam War.[8]

THE ALAMO AND AMERICA’S GREAT FRONTIERING MISSION

Just how much impact another more widely known event in Texas’s history—the Battle of the Alamo and its related “Alamo syndrome”—had on Johnson’s foreign policy decisions is difficult to gauge, but it is there. For LBJ, Texas history’s most sacred battle, dating back 130 years, represented the ultimate expression of human courage and sacrifice. Only a hundred miles from Johnson City, those heroic frontier figures Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Colonel William Travis, and James Bonham died, according to the American frontier myth, in the name of independence and freedom.

According to Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, LBJ believed that the Alamo epitomized the American frontier experience, which shaped both his outlook and policy decisions—especially as they related to the Cold War and Vietnam: “The Alamo was ingrained into Johnson’s intellectual makeup, central to the way he made sense of world events.” For LBJ and millions of other Americans, the defenders of the Alamo were real-life superheroes who made the patriot’s ultimate sacrifice, carrying freedom’s fight to the backward Mexicans in the cause of Texas independence and, ultimately, American expansion.[9]

Lyndon Johnson wanted so much to have a blood connection to those dead heroes that, in 1966 while on a tour of East Asia, he created one by boldly claiming that “my great-great-grandfather died at the Alamo.” Investigative journalists soon discovered, however, that the great-great-grandfather to whom Johnson seemed to be referring was actually a real estate trader who died at home in bed—forcing Johnson to retract his statement.[10] Johnson similarly insisted he personally had been fired upon by “a Japanese ace” during World War II, but as with the claims about his great-great-grandfather, no evidence could be found to support his assertion.[11] It could be assumed, and often has been, that Johnson was lying about the Alamo connection and the Japanese ace to promote his own status. But it is also likely that by this time Johnson’s connection to the frontier mythology had convinced him that these stories and connections were actually true: that the power of the narrative structure of the frontier myth had transformed the actual events of history in Johnson’s own mind so that he reimagined himself and his family as central players in the frontier fight and stories of heroic Americanism. Here was a vivid case in point of how the structure had completely transformed LBJ’s own understanding of the events of history. By contrast, the event of the Vietnam War would, for the nation, play a significant role in transforming the structure of the frontier myth by starkly revealing its shortcomings as a lens through which all American history, past, present, and future, could be understood and explained.

According to biographers, as a boy Lyndon missed few cowboy classics at Johnson City’s Opera House because its owner paid him off in tickets for passing out handbills of coming attractions. But Lyndon and his friends’ greatest obsession was acting out the early history of the Lone Star State, especially those revolving around the Alamo. Back in 1905 his father, Sam Johnson, had cosponsored a bill to purchase the Alamo Mission for sixty-five hundred dollars to prevent it from being torn down and replaced by a hotel. “He took me as a little boy down there,” Johnson recalled with pride, “and showed it to me many times.” According to childhood friends, little Lyndon pored over the details of the attack to the point that the Alamo re-creations became a kind of religious experience for him. No boy felt prouder than Lyndon Baines Johnson as he pretended to be Colonel William Barrett Travis drawing his line in the earth, or heroic defenders Jim Bowie or Davy Crockett, leading the legendary group of 187. Tears flowed down Lyndon’s cheeks when he would read Colonel Travis’s letter to his government, which included the line, “Take care of my son.” No boy who cared could ever forget March 1836 and the glory of the brave men who died at the Alamo in the name of Texas’s independence.[12]

Johnson proclaimed repeatedly throughout his life that the men at the Alamo had died like “real men” and that to show weakness was unmanly. And just as countless western frontier and cowboy heroes of LBJ’s upbringing had asserted, and TR had earlier expounded in his lecture on “The Strenuous Life” and its virtues, nations—like men—could not afford to be unmanly. In the nuclear age—as if pioneering Americans were still menaced by Native Americans while attempting to fetch water on the frontier—Johnson liked to say, “He’s a good man to go to the well with.”[13] Men had to be strong, like the Alamo’s 187, TR with his big stick, his father who had stood up to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and FDR pushing the country forward to defeat Hitler and Tojo. In the president’s mind, all American men fighting in Vietnam should be just as ready to give up their lives in the defense of liberty.

Perhaps of all the characteristics of the mythic frontier hero, the one that Johnson wanted most applied to himself was that of manly toughness and virtue. As a senator he must have been pleased by a Look magazine article from 1959 that made much of Lyndon Johnson’s “masculine appeal to the female voter.” Part of LBJ’s effort to build up his own “tough guy,” frontier-type image involved cutting down others for their comparative lack of virile manliness. LBJ’s self-promoted machismo, at others’ expense, included the following examples: a postassassination mocking of “yellow, sickly, sickly . . . weak and pallid . . . not a man’s man” Jack Kennedy and his family’s vacationland on that “female island,” Martha’s Vineyard; belittling Hubert Humphrey for not being “a real man” because “he cried as easily as a woman”; spending lengthy periods at gatherings of those he considered “real men” while belittling his favorite target of all, Adlai Stevenson, for his sophisticated accent (“tomawto”) and other characteristics he deemed effeminate; and dismissing Lady Bird’s doubts about the war because “of course . . . it was like a woman to be uncertain.” “Being a woman,” his wife may have had an “excuse” for weakness but to say “not a man’s man” were the most damning words in LBJ’s lexicon.[14]

The degree to which Johnson had linked his own manhood directly to the Vietnam War—America’s modern frontier conflict—was made crudely evident after a 1967 cabinet meeting. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall stayed behind for less formal discussions, and before long his boss had launched into a tirade about “his war” in Asia. According to Udall, Johnson shouted at him and the few others present, “‘Who the hell was Ho Chi Minh, anyway, that he thought he could push America around?’ Then the President did an astonishing thing: he unzipped his trousers, dangled a given appendage, and asked his shocked associates: ‘Has Ho Chi Minh got anything like that?’” Johnson’s self-image of himself was as the lead in America’s twentieth-century frontier experience. Manly, tough, self-reliant, the cowboy president would lead the cavalry’s assault on a weaker, inferior society, defeat the enemy, and bring liberation, prosperity, and democracy to a previously backward region.[15]

As indicated, Johnson thought throughout his lifetime in terms of American exceptionalism: he believed in American opportunity, responsibility, good intentions, superiority, infallibility, and destiny. As a child he had learned a poem that he often quoted as an adult, proclaiming that “the most beautiful sight his eyes had beheld was ‘the flag of my country in a foreign land.’” At home Johnson showed great compassion for the poor and minorities, but in politics and international relations he subscribed wholly to the survival of the fittest and the notion that the big fish ate the little fish. When it served his goals, LBJ also insisted on “evening the odds” to create a fair fight. Among the most complex of men ever to occupy the White House, LBJ could be both pacifist and aggressive, peaceful and warlike, gentle and tough, a tolerant champion of civil rights but, at times, still paternalistic. Up against what he viewed as a global Communist monolith, LBJ would lead the pioneering forces westward that would bring light into the darkness, reportedly telling his staff, “We’re going to liberate those poor little boogers [the South Vietnamese], and I’ll be known as the great emancipator.”[16]

Whether Johnson ever actually read Frederick Jackson Turner or Theodore Roosevelt’s writings that shaped and gave coherence to the frontier myth is not clear, but what is certain is that this myth permeated and informed all aspects of Johnson’s thinking and actions.[17] In 1966 Johnson declared, as a matter of fact, “So many of our pioneer ancestors often ventured into the wilderness with only three possessions—their rifle, their axe, and their Bible.” Turner had mentioned the rifle and axe in 1910, specifically, as those tools of the greatest necessity to the pioneer. “They meant,” wrote Turner, “a training in aggressive courage, in domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness. . . . But even this backwoodsman was more than a mere destroyer. He had visions. He was a finder as well as a fighter—the trail maker for civilization, the inventor of new ways” for “quite as deeply fixed in the pioneer’s mind as the ideal of individualism was the idea of democracy.” Similarly, Lyndon Johnson’s fundamental foreign policy was the promise and purpose of a worldwide war on poverty in the name of the values of individualism and democracy, along with the use of massive firepower to attain the immediate thing: stopping the Vietcong in Vietnam without waiting for the United Nations. Johnson once explained,

We have two phases of the war out there. I am going to let you in on a secret. You have heard just about the military phase; this other has been kept under wraps. We do not know much about it, because Captain Carpenter giving an order to come in to bomb his position is much more dramatic than some fellow that is washing up the kids, and treating their wounds, and teaching them to read and write—a Marine who has fought all day, that is working all night to help in these things.

But we are doing a great job there on health . . . and on conservation, and on beautification, and on housing, and on slums in this country [and it] is contagious. And it is moving to other countries. It is setting an example for other countries.[18]

Johnson’s remarks were consistent with those he had made back in 1965 and captured by Fred O. Siebel of the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch in his “Stretching It Around the World” editorial cartoon. Here an animated LBJ appears in his Stetson, boots, and spurs proclaiming, “We mean to show that this nation’s dream of a Great Society does not stop at the water’s edge. It is not just an American Dream.” As he speaks, Johnson is busy wrapping a “The Great Society” ribbon around the globe, which lists its features: “War on Ignorance, War on Poverty, War on Disease, War on Crime, Etc-Etc-Etc.” In his remarks upon receiving an honorary degree from the University of Denver in 1966, LBJ told his audience, “The overriding rule which I want to affirm [is] that our foreign policy must always be an extension of our domestic policy.” This, for Johnson, was America’s great mission and gift to the world. LBJ, then, envisioned a continuation of the pioneer’s quest of bringing a superior American way of life to foreign frontiers as he now eyed American interests throughout the world. But his testing ground, across the Pacific in Southeast Asia, would prove an ill-suited and highly problematic region to fulfill this alleged “destiny.”[19]

Perhaps the most fatal error of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was his projection of the frontier West’s image and structure onto the rest of the world. For LBJ, the frontier-myth experience that had made “the greatest country of Earth” could also serve as a narrative for the rest of the world. But what he regarded as creating opportunities for the frontier myth to take root overseas was interpreted by people in other parts of the globe as an attempt to push American-style democracy, values, and aspirations on peoples with vastly different outlooks. It was a recipe for disaster and failure. Blinded by the frontier myth, LBJ could not comprehend alternative possibilities or traditions to those that he had wholeheartedly since childhood committed to defending and promoting himself. In keeping with this myopic view, President Johnson’s first attempted solution for resolving the war in Vietnam involved the extension of “American” values through the offer of a massive economic project to develop the Mekong Valley (“Old Ho can’t turn me down, old Ho can’t turn me down,” he kept repeating to aides after making the offer). LBJ had read Barbara Ward’s Rich Nations, Poor Nations repeatedly and was convinced, through his own simplistic interpretation, that the United States could raise the standard of living in any country if the Communists could be defeated or at least subdued. What LBJ failed to comprehend was that foreign leaders were unwilling to bargain with him the same way that politicians, labor leaders, and businessmen did back home: Uncle Ho was not George Meany. As the editor of the Waukesha (Wisc.) Freemen later observed, LBJ “wanted the world to work by his clock and when it didn’t he once remarked, the trouble with foreigners is ‘they’re not like folks you were reared with.’” Johnson could not accept or adjust to the reality that foreign relations had to be handled differently than domestic affairs. Insisting that Hanoi would not negotiate, Johnson declared that “freedom’s frontiers” were “under attack” and that “I have searched high and wide and I am a reasonably good cowboy and I can’t even rope anybody and bring him in that is willing to talk reason.” Initially public opinion polls and the popular press supported Johnson’s view and his decisions as “prudent.” But by 1967–68, when it became clear that attempts to plug in the American system overseas were not working, confidence in this approach and in the president collapsed. Johnson had become a victim in an event-versus-structure dichotomy in which the former, Vietnam, was sucking the life from the latter: LBJ’s cherished pole star, the frontier myth.[20]

Despite mounting sentiment against the war, Lyndon Johnson stayed the course. Increasingly, the virtues of the American civilizer appeared in LBJ’s speeches about the Vietnam conflict, counterpoised by the alleged “savagery” of the Vietcong with their marauding murderers, rapists, and torturers. Speaking at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, 1965, Johnson enthusiastically praised the heroic efforts of Americans in Southeast Asia, but then his words took on an ominous tone. Vietnam, LBJ asserted, “is a war of unparalleled brutality. Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks.” Here, the president told his audience, were civilization and savagery going head to head—not in nineteenth-century Texas or Arizona but today on the frontiers of Southeast Asia.[21] Like the brave pioneers and farmer settlers said to have faced marauding Indians and outlaws in the frontier West, the innocents of the world now needed help from the US Cavalry, or its modern-day equivalents.

LBJ’s frontier-fight descriptions of the Vietnam War are prime examples of a myth’s structure being projected onto an event in a manner that created an alternate version of the event than what the television evening news sometimes portrayed. With the escalation of the war in 1965 and the increasing buildup of journalists assigned to cover Vietnam, it became more difficult for the three television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—reports to resist controversial news. As J. Fred MacDonald outlined in Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam, the Johnson White House and Pentagon worked aggressively to manage reporters but with dwindling success. The most renowned early instance of controversy was triggered on August 5, 1965, with Morley Safer’s report for the CBS Evening News that showed US Marines torching thatched huts at the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters. The image of elderly South Vietnamese running away while their American protectors destroyed their homes and meager possessions made for wrenching TV viewing. Safer’s accompanying audio description only intensified the video impact. “Today’s operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature,” Safer observed. “To a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of back-breaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.” Morley Safer’s story revealed that the white-hat American soldiers were behaving in ways that dramatically departed from the cowboy code: committing atrocities as bad as any black-hat Communist atrocity. This sense of contradiction would only intensify with the passing of time and the mounting of reports describing American soldiers wantonly killing hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, most notoriously at My Lai in 1968. For America’s frontier myth the great irony here lies in the fact that what was being reported is strikingly similar to what Frederick Jackson Turner described in his frontier thesis. For Turner and his contemporaries, the frontier had been a place where Americans on the edge of civilization and savagery had descended into the latter to overcome it and create a better society for the nation in the process. In Vietnam, however, the killing and atrocities on both sides only seemed to ramp up while, simultaneously, the false statements and corruption coming from the governments in Washington and Saigon intensified. After several years of fighting and escalations, a growing segment of the public came to perceive as limitless America’s commitment to the conflict in terms of lives, resources, and time frame.[22]

By 1967 LBJ was perplexed over the failure of the myth to deliver but remained determined to hold out for what he perceived as its promise of victory in the end. Journalist Hugh Sidey later recalled a distraught LBJ explaining that as the Vietnam situation deteriorated, he could not simply cut and run in Southeast Asia, “insisting that he had gone into South Vietnam because, as at the Alamo, somebody had to get behind the log of those threatened people.” But while LBJ recalled the grim courage of the Texas patriots fighting the “double-dealing” Mexicans, he did not appear directly cognizant of the downside of this analogy: that the defenders of the Alamo were annihilated. Sidey himself thought the “lesson” of the Alamo “served us ill,” explaining to one interviewer in 1992 that on many evenings at the White House, he and others on the press corps would be talking to the president about Vietnam and that “after he had discussed all the theories and rejected all the criticism—it would boil down to Johnson saying, ‘Boys, this is just like the Alamo! I grew up forty miles from it. I always felt somebody should have helped those men in the Alamo! I’m going to Vietnam! I’m going to help those people in Vietnam. I’m not going to be the first president to lose a war!” The American myth of invincibility, another feature of the frontier myth, was clearly at work in LBJ’s mind. Johnson was unwilling to pull the United States out of the Vietnam War without a face-saving victory. No president during the Cold War wanted to be the one who dishonored the nation’s supposed record of having gloriously won all its wars. In reality, the presidents who involved the United States directly in the Vietnam War should have either known their history better or been more honest about their nation’s past. The War of 1812 was not an outright victory but at best a draw for the United States, as was the Korean conflict—though the latter was officially the responsibility of the United Nations. To Sidey, LBJ’s position was “hopeless” on the matter since he felt that he just could not violate that sense of history or sense of legacy that he brought from Texas to the White House.[23]

Both in the United States and abroad LBJ’s adherence to the frontier myth in shaping the substance of his policies, and efforts to shape his own frontier cowboy image, were near absolute. Further, the myth was not only present in Johnson’s own thinking and actions, it had become so deeply embedded in and fundamentally supportive of the structures of American society and its sense of self-identity that the president and (at least initially) most of his contemporaries were prevented from seeing Vietnam for what it was. The war in Indochina was a profound historical event, deeply affecting that region of the world and its number-one foreign protagonist, the United States. The ordeal impacted almost every American family and shaped the contours of American society and politics from the mid-1960s onward. But the war could not be explained or interpreted within the existing context of the frontier-myth paradigm: its failure to achieve a victory or to bring about the kinds of transformations that the myth had promised made the Vietnam event too much for the structure to subsume. As such, Vietnam challenged and shook to its core the foundation of the frontier myth.

THE FAILED EVENT OF VIETNAM

Trouble came for LBJ when the bad guys, the Vietcong, refused to be defeated in the face of cowboy resolve and when black and white, good and bad were complicated by the controversial nightly news reports of the America’s first television war, the rallies of the peace movement, and the messages of the counterculture—when the myth could not accommodate the event of the Vietnam War. By the final year of Johnson’s Administration, American society itself had divided up between those who supported the land war in Asia and those who backed protestors shouting such slogans as, “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “Hey, hey LBJ . . . how many kids did you kill today?” outside the gates of the White House. Vietnam was taking thousands of American lives, costing the American taxpayer $30 billion a year, and since 1965, causing the administration to expend on the war all of its energy, eloquence, prestige, and Johnson’s patent “persuasiveness.” Worse still, the Newark and Detroit race riots of 1967 were being brought under control by members of the same U.S. Marine and Army divisions that had also turned their weapons against the very cities that they had been defending in South Vietnam, creating what Richard Slotkin identified as a bizarre inversion of policies. This inversion was captured in the phrase allegedly used by an American officer to explain why the South Vietnamese town of Ben Tre needed to be evacuated so that sections could be leveled by the US Army: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Vietnam was not the American Southwest or the Plains. The belief that America’s frontier-myth traditions and victories could be imposed on Southeast Asia came to be viewed by millions of Americans as flawed policy: the events there and its spinoffs on the home front could no longer be explained by the frontier myth. A perplexed Lyndon Johnson felt the heat, confiding privately to Lady Bird, “I can’t get out. I can’t finish it with what I’ve got so what the hell can I do?”[24]

By 1968, events abroad were wreaking havoc with LBJ’s frontier myth–inspired domestic programs as well. Critics pointed out that due to the enormous costs of Vietnam, the war on poverty was being put on a back burner just as the administration had aroused enormous expectations. What shocked Johnson and supporters of his programs most was that Great Society initiatives—along with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act—had not even appeared to improve the levels of hope and goodwill in the inner cities. Instead many TV viewers were left with the impression that the Great Society was actually stoking the twentieth century’s most violent and widespread US riots. Eventually the “Great Society” term itself had to be dropped by an administration already known for tending toward verbal overkill.

Tragically, unlike the “Great Society” phrase, the term “frontier” was never dropped from LBJ’s list of favorite expressions. Though frustrated by the mounting crises and failures, Johnson stubbornly refused to see the limitations of the myth’s structures as a lens for understanding complicated foreign affairs and the events of the Vietnam War. Rather, in matters of foreign policy, Johnson frequently invoked the term “frontiers of freedom” to describe Americans facing down Communists, whether in Southeast Asia or Europe. LBJ’s press secretary from 1964 to 1966, George Reedy, was the one (and perhaps only) member of Johnson’s staff who did not care for the frequent application of the term “frontier” to the administration’s policies and blamed its ubiquity as one of the sources of long-term trouble for his boss. “I didn’t like the term ‘frontier,’” he explained years later. The term

bothered me because I knew that this was going to get into the international realm. . . . You know, in Europe ‘frontier’ is a very, very unwholesome term, because that’s the way war starts, somebody crosses a frontier. The difficulty with it, it’s a word that gets a very warm reception in the United States because we think of it as settling the unknown and taming the untamed and that kind of thing, but in the world of discourse, it’s a very bad word to use. I wanted it knocked out of his speeches altogether.

Reedy’s protests fell flat. In 1966, after spending many years working for Johnson, he took a leave of absence from the administration over differences with his boss on Vietnam. Four years later George Reedy published an influential book, The Twilight of the Presidency, that took a critical view of the modern presidency—including its reliance on the frontier mentality—and the impact of war on the office. Johnson reportedly rejected his former staffer’s frank assessment and refused to speak with Reedy again. As Brian Dippie found in the case of the vanishing American myth, the frontier myth had resulted in certain policy decisions despite the reality of events not fitting the myth. Reedy was perceptive enough to identify, though in a very general sense, this overall inconsistency in America’s Vietnam policy, but LBJ and the majority of his advisers were not.[25]

As I have argued, the belief in a westering mission of the United States to spread democracy and its values around the globe led to a massive buildup of American forces in South Vietnam, peaking at well over a half-million US troops in 1968. That same year, Americans had perhaps never before become so frustrated by both an unresolved crises at home and an unresolved war abroad. One national disaster seemed to follow another for the United States until, by late spring, many Americans perceived that the nation was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The lessons of the frontier myth and its association with America’s identity and destiny were about to be severely shaken by a series of events that could not be explained by and seemed to challenge the myth at every turn. On January 31, 1968, the first day of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, Communist forces launched an enormous, concerted attack on American strongholds throughout South Vietnam. Though militarily a failure for the North, what made the Tet Offensive so shocking to the TV-viewing public was the sight of Communist forces in the heart of a supposedly secure Saigon setting off bombs, shooting down South Vietnamese officials and troops, and holding down fortified areas including, for a brief time, the grounds of the American Embassy. The invincibility of the United States and belief that it was an undefeated nation of benevolent conquerors was collapsing on the evening news to an audience of millions.

Events were going very badly at home as well. In early April, Martin Luther King Jr., the most influential leader in the civil rights movement, was shot and killed by James Earl Ray while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis. Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), the Democratic candidate for president favored most by those opposed to the war and by African Americans, was shot and killed by another assassin. (Having just won the California primary, RFK had told his supporters minutes before, “I think we can end the division within the United States, the violence.”) Then in August, at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, there was chaos outside the convention hall as thousands of antiwar demonstrators moved toward the building and were met by half of the Chicago police force decked out in riot gear. Hundreds of protestors were injured in a “police riot” that attempted to disperse the crowds with tear gas and billy clubs. Aware that the violence was being televised to the nation, the demonstrators taunted Chicago’s finest by chanting, “The whole world is watching.”

By the spring of 1968, even “The Spirit of TR” offers little comfort to LBJ. The Pueblo incident, the capture of a US Navy ship and crew by North Korea in January, added more insult to American injuries overseas. Almost a year later, the American crew was forced to write a false confession to secure their release. (Ralph Vinson, New Orleans [La.] States-Item, 1968, Capital City Press / Georges Media Group, Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

American-style democracy—believed to be the most important product of the frontier experience—had long been envisioned as being able to solve any crisis, but in 1968 the electoral process itself now appeared to be under assault. A Harris poll showed that more than half of the country shared the view of third-party candidate George Wallace and his “hardhats,” that “liberals, intellectuals and longhairs have run the country for too long.” Certainly the hope that South Vietnam could emulate American democracy now seemed emptier than ever. If anything, the reverse seemed to be happening, with American riots, conspiracies, and assassinations mimicking the vast corruption that had long been associated with the regime in Saigon.[26]

Even before the two assassinations and chaos in Chicago, the division within the country that had challenged the prerogative of its cowboy leader to decide on his own what was in America’s best interests led to Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection. On March 31, 1968, he surprised the nation in a televised address by stating, “I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” After a brutal year for the Democrats and the nation, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, would eventually secure the Democratic Party nomination but not the presidency.[27]

THE COLLAPSE AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE MYTH

When LBJ emerged on the national scene in the late 1950s, western movies, TV shows, and novels were at the height of their popularity. As many as sixty million viewers per night watched the television westerns, and by January 1959, eight of the top ten programs were of that genre.[28] The American West had become a parable for American society, and the challenges that pioneers and ranchers faced in the past inspired Americans to solve new cultural, social, and political problems in the present and plan for the future. The national culture shifted westward, and the political chameleon LBJ shifted with it. In fact, LBJ became a kind of prototype as Americans turned to their mythic origins to provide the inspiration to face the complex tensions of the modern world. Tapping into the nostalgia for a bygone America, LBJ’s persona, clothing, cowboy talk, and ranch represented that national heritage and became symbols of self-reliance, individualism, democracy, and the frontier age in an era when the nation treated these ideas without scorn or cynicism. Here was something authentic and tangible as opposed to the allegedly phony values of the Northeast, as Johnson represented what the public had long viewed as the quintessential American experience. Initially this increased LBJ’s power to persuade and to announce as authentic his aspirations and dreams for the nation.

But while Johnson was personally invested in and initially benefited from the frontier myth so pervasive in American politics and culture, the nation had changed by the time he left office in January 1969—its values moving away from the traditional version of the myth that was crucial to LBJ’s success and inherent in his outlook. The significance of the western and frontier myths had shifted as a result of a growing movement to expose the long-standing myth for what the counterculture and antiwar protests thought it was: a violent cultural tradition based on self-interest, greed, and false depictions of good versus evil—not one based on morality or truth—and one that was now serving destructive ends. The traditional western myths were a reflection of ideas that had moved off of the national stage. By the end of the turbulent 1960s, then, Johnson’s version of the frontier myth had become an anachronism—and, for many, a dangerous one.

THE END OF THE TRAIL FOR COWBOY JOHNSON

LBJ had been elected in 1964 with the largest percentage of the popular vote in US history, and his approval rating in early 1965 was over 70 percent. Within two years, though, this mandate evaporated. As early as the summer of 1965, US cities exploded with race riots. A series of long, hot summers in the years that followed were rife with street violence, war protests, and assassinations that shook the positive attitude of the country and caused some members of the public who were already lukewarm toward civil rights and the Vietnam War to turn away from both. By January 1967 Newsweek was reporting that praise of Johnson as a man who “gets things done” had dropped to just one-third of what it had been two years earlier, while the percentage of Americans who identified LBJ as “clever as a fox,” a “power grabber,” and a “conniver” had tripled from the year before. During the first three years of his presidency, cowboy Johnson had been the most-admired man in the country, but the warm relationship with the American public and with foreign nations did not last. Now, it seemed, almost everyone wanted LBJ to hit the trail. By March 1968, just 36 percent of Americans supported his handling of the presidency while more than half disapproved. Much of this decline related directly to US military involvement in Vietnam as the public grew more unfavorable toward LBJ’s Vietnam policies than toward his policies in general. Consensus in 1964 had gradually been replaced by open conflict four years later and an outright rejection of the symbolism and values that frontier Johnson was viewed as representing. By August 1968 the Tet Offensive, the Pueblo crisis, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (and possibly RFK as well), and mayhem at the Democratic National Convention all contributed to his lowest approval rating during his presidency: just 35 percent. Johnson’s steady reliance on the frontier myth had backfired as events caused rejection of its old tenets. Americans questioned their own involvement in a foreign land and their own self-assessment of superiority; less confident than before, many gradually began a new quest for a sense of national purpose, but this would not come before more trials and tribulations in the decade that followed.[29]

Historian Paul Conkin wrote, “In his five years as president, Johnson moved from brilliant early success and from intense but fulfilling engagement to galling frustration, a sense of failure, and then to a characteristic withdrawal.” The frontier myth and related Cold War rhetoric of America’s duties in the world were so pervasive and accepted, it would be difficult to blame Johnson or most of his speechwriters too much for not seeing where the rhetoric was ultimately leading them. Most of the nation had bought fully into the notion of an American duty to extend its superior civilization throughout the world, to “go west” as the pioneers had done. The western seemed to embody the psychology of the East-West global struggle between communism and democracy and had offered clear answers to complex questions and a paradigm of dedication to purpose. But in the context of Southeast Asia the American experience was something altogether different than the frontier experience. The guidance of the myth no longer provided the answers needed to deal with the complex events that confronted and confounded an unraveling American nation.[30]

Lyndon Johnson worked hard from the outset at projecting himself as a “president of all the people,” excluding no group with the possible exception of the Goldwater Republicans. For Johnson, the domestic frontiers of the future encompassed people helping people, especially through federal government programs; protection of the environment at a time when the limits of land use and exploitation were becoming increasingly understood; freedom, racial equality, and the promotion of the democratic process; and an overall determination to make things better for future generations. “The woman I really loved, the Great Society,” said Johnson, represented “all my hopes, and all my dreams.” For LBJ, the frontier myth encompassed and represented these progressive, forward-thinking programs that he believed in and attempted to champion. But they also defined the parameters in which Johnson, through his vision of the frontier experience, was able to move. Perhaps most important of all, LBJ’s great passion for winning in Vietnam and in Congress seemed to cloud his understanding that, on its own, passing legislation does not always fix international or national problems and that government resources were not the bonanza that he had perceived.[31]

Edward W. Chester’s evaluation of LBJ’s newspaper obituaries in Presidential Studies Quarterly reveals the mind-set of the nation at the time of Johnson’s death in January 1973. The home paper of the Kennedy clan, the Standard-Times (MA) in Hyannis, summed up the LBJ legacy for many of the editorialists: “Bitter irony lies in the fate of Lyndon Baines Johnson, a President who could have been among the greatest ever in this country, but who left office in 1969, reviled and repudiated by millions.” The Baltimore Evening Sun raised a key observation, that the American failure to get a win in Vietnam destroyed “an oversimplified American notion of national invincibility”—a staple ingredient of the frontier myth. And Johnson’s credibility gap loomed heavy, with the Standard-Times critic determining that “in the end, he took America into the Vietnam War by trickery and stealth and deceit.” Immediately following Johnson’s death, Vietnam appeared as if it were the only foreign policy issue that mattered; even commentators who highly commended Johnson for his impressive program of domestic reform always added that his legacy and administration had been tarnished by the Vietnam albatross. LBJ’s adherence to and projection of the older version of the frontier myth, which had done so much to facilitate his rise to the presidency, would ultimately be tied closely to the inability of this same paradigm to accommodate the war in Southeast Asia. A political and ideological crisis of such intensity as that experienced in 1967–68 affected all areas of American politics, cultural life, and expression by challenging the fundamental belief that the nation’s presidents, political leaders, and institutions were on the whole reliable and worthy of the public’s trust. Upon LBJ’s passing, cartoonist Dan Morgan depicted “The End of the Trail,” using James Earle Fraser’s 1915 sculpture as a model for the vanishing American—only this time it was cowboy Johnson mounted and slumping on a horse instead of an American Indian. More broadly, the symbolism might also be taken to represent the “doomed fate” of the liberal nationalist version of the frontier myth.[32]

THE LIBERAL FRONTIER MYTH FAILS THE TEST

In the eyes of the American public, the frontier myth—with which LBJ had so closely associated himself—had failed the nation by proving woefully inadequate to accommodate the war or to accomplish what the public had anticipated at home.[33] The myth could not absorb hundreds of young Americans dying each week in a faraway, poorly understood war. As historian D. W. Brogan explained in 1967, “The desire to be right as well as victorious is deeply embedded in the American psyche.” A connection between right and victory—and, conversely, that to be defeated is to be wrong—clearly existed as a major ingredient of the frontier myth. And this time it appeared to many that the nationalist liberal version practiced by LBJ, and inherited in many respects from Theodore Roosevelt, failed the test. The frontier tradition promised success in battling savage Indians and building successful enterprises from ranches and farms to commerce and industry. But the inescapable fact of Vietnam was that America did not win. Victory eluded the superpower, thereby undermining national confidence in the classic story of the frontiersman-cowboy-vs.-Indian confrontation. To make matters worse, the public watched with horror at home as soldiers drawn from US units sent to Vietnam turned their guns against the same inner-city Americans whom Johnson’s Great Society programs had been created to uplift. And with multiple assassinations and demonstrations, American democracy itself seemed under assault. Journalist Saul Pett wrote in 1970, “America is no longer . . . immune to history . . . no longer infinite in space or resources or hope. There is no next valley or virgin forest to tread.” The gloomy side of the frontier myth that Turner had warned about after the closing of the frontier now appeared to emerge full blown, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his “failed” philosophies, for many conservatives, independents, and liberals alike, were to blame. Cowboy Johnson not only botched his wars, he threatened a sacred feature of the national frontier myth: the belief that America was the favored nation.[34]

In an image-conscious political culture, political figures had become closely likened with icons—one of whom was Lyndon Johnson. Throughout the late 1960s and in the decades that followed, LBJ stood as the central figure against whom conservatives, and even some Democrats, would define their own political beliefs. With forces spiraling out of control by 1967–68, Johnson came to personify the perceived failures of cowboy liberalism in the 1960s. His inability to maintain control over his image was painfully evident by the end of his presidency. Though the frontier myth, which transcended LBJ himself, would survive as a master explanation for the nation’s destiny and as a constant in American thinking, it could not endure in the same form that it had for much of the twentieth century. A new cycle of events, set in motion by the Vietnam experience in particular, would now redefine the myth’s parameters over the course of the 1970s.

From the late 1960s through 1980, the perceived meanings of the frontier myth changed, as did what it meant to be a liberal and a conservative. As political scientist Bruce Miroff contended in his recent study The Liberals’ Moment, the political earthquake of 1968 “marked the fatal rupture that divided the Democratic coalition.” That year, Republican Richard Nixon would be elected and, though interrupted by Watergate, would begin the conservative ascendance that would take full hold under the Reagan Revolution and bring about a reconstructed frontier myth.[35]

FRONTIER MYTH IN REMISSION

Following one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history, the Republican phoenix Richard Milhous Nixon took over the Oval Office in January 1969 after defeating Hubert Humphrey at the ballot box in November. During his five years in office, Nixon rarely attempted to cash in on the now-receded frontier-western myth. Though he was from Southern California, undoubtedly the Far West, Nixon promoted much more the persona of a generic national politician rather than one with western attributes. Strangely, though, his foreign relations adviser and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, did understand himself as a kind of cowman with portfolio. Dr. Kissinger envisioned his own diplomatic technique as that of the heroic loner who comes to the rescue. In 1972 he boasted to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, “I’ve always acted alone. Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride on his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse. Without even a pistol, maybe, because he doesn’t go in for shooting. He acts, that’s all: aiming at the right spot at the right time. A Wild West tale, if you like.”[36] Thankfully, Kissinger did not buy a ranch.

Westerns of any kind, including anti-westerns, were becoming increasingly rare by 1971. The “heroic” Western myth and symbolism that informed the politics of the Lyndon Johnson years took a hiatus from the end of his administration until 1980—having been submerged by Vietnam, race riots, and a deepening recession. Stock in the old western myth seemed to reach a low point with the release of Mel Brooks’s full-blown western farce, Blazing Saddles, in 1974—the same year that the Watergate scandal ended Nixon’s presidency. For a time during the 1970s—in its liberal, conservative, and more radical forms—the myth seemed to just hang there in a state of limbo. In country music, the Statler Brothers’ song “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?,” released in 1974, featured a chorus that both inquired into and lamented the disappearance of the white-hat, code-abiding heroes of westerns past:

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott,

riding the trail alone?

Whatever happened to Gene and Tex

and Roy and Rex? The Durango Kid?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott,

has happened to the best of me.[37]

The last line is apparently an indication of a direct connection between the frontier western story and American society; here the suggestion appears to be that the absence of genuine cowboy heroes reflects a broader decline in society (reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel’s baseball-star lament in their 1968 hit “Mrs. Robinson”: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you”). The departure of Scott speaks of something having “happened” to everyone else as well. Nowhere did this appear more evident than at the level of the American presidency.

During the remainder of the 1970s, Americans’ ability to respond to major issues impacting the nation was undermined by what was perceived as a crisis in leadership as the American public rejected three successive presidents: Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Richard Nixon’s overwhelming victory in 1972 quickly went sour, and in less than two years he was forced into resignation over the Watergate scandal. Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon and his perceived failure to respond effectively to the OPEC oil boycott, bankruptcy in New York City, and Vietnam, where Saigon fell in 1975, undermined his own presidential image and contributed to his defeat in 1976. Then a kind of aberration from the conservative trend occurred when Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter was elected to the presidency as an outsider in 1976. Unfortunately for the former Georgia governor, he had inherited the ruined ideology of liberal progressivism, which, if not dead, was at best in intensive care.

THE TRIALS OF JIMMY CARTER

James Earl “Jimmy” Carter of Plains, Georgia, was not a western cowboy but a southern peanut farmer. While a fellow Democrat, Carter did little to rehabilitate the reputation of Lyndon Johnson when he ran for president against Gerald Ford in 1976. In fact, Carter treated Johnson as anathema and rarely even mentioned his name. Antigovernment sentiment and folksy charm played to Jimmy Carter’s advantage in the 1976 general election campaign as he worked hard to portray himself as the honest Washington outsider. Carter’s team managed to avoid having its candidate labeled as either liberal or a conservative; by the nation’s bicentennial year, this was perceived to be a losing game. On November 2, 1976, Carter won a narrow victory over President Ford, but the big election story was the poor voter turnout. “Neither Ford nor Carter won as many votes as Mr. Nobody,” one reporter observed in making a connection to the fact that almost half of the nation’s eligible voters did not show up at the polling booths.[38]

On the heels of the defeat in Vietnam, events and circumstances that had disempowered the frontier myth and sent it into temporary remission only seemed to accelerate during the years of the Carter administration. In terms of presidential decisions and actions, Carter, like Ford before him, had inherited an almost insurmountable set of domestic and international problems: high unemployment, growing trade deficits, “stagflation” of inflation and slow growth, record-high energy prices, and dropping productivity. Carter was expected to fix all of these problems and the national spirit through political institutions and progressive policies in which many Americans had lost faith. Despite a variety of efforts, the economic and international situation only worsened. The seizure of American hostages in Iran, held for fourteen long months, seemed a metaphor for the Carter administration and the nation’s impotence. “Television,” wrote William C. Spragens, “reinforced his image as a vacillating, weak, and confused leader.”[39]

The can-do spirit of the now-spent liberal version of the frontier myth reached a low point with the deflating events and circumstances of the late 1970s. In his 1980 State of the Union address, Carter asked Americans to make sacrifices and talked about the United States as a nation of limits. Carter told viewers to turn down their thermostats, said that the nation needed to lower some of its loftier goals, and indicated that it was in the best interests of peace to accommodate the Soviets where possible. Jimmy Carter had found so much confusion in the country that he scolded his fellow Americans for committing the crime of malaise. The president’s sentiments, though perhaps well founded, were especially demoralizing in a country that had long defined itself in terms of growth, and his statement stoked a fear that dated back to the close of the frontier. Some Americans perceived in ominous terms the Census Bureau’s declaration of the close of the frontier in 1890. Turner had explained that the frontier had shaped and defined Americans; without any frontiers, the nation ran the risk of becoming, well, un-American. LBJ had spoken of metaphorical frontiers in education, in the macro frontier of space, and through the construction of hydroelectric projects. Now Carter—who seemed to personify the passing of the confident, liberal frontier myth of the TR and Johnson administrations—was telling the country that these metaphors were drying up too. None of this sat well with the American electorate, and many preferred to blame Carter for this rather than themselves.[40]

By 1980 Carter had become, for some, a kind of antithesis of the presidential image, a kind of anti–frontiersman-cowboy who just seemed incapable of getting the job done. In the summer of that year he received the lowest approval rating for a president ever recorded up until that time—21 percent. One week prior to the presidential election in November, even the sympathetic New York Times lamented that “President Wobble . . . seemed to be all sail and no boat.” In 1979, polls had revealed that what the electorate now wanted was “strong leadership” but not a return to what were perceived as the “failed” visions of the 1960s. The ruined ideology of liberal progressivism had resulted in a temporary hiatus of the frontier myth. Now a growing number of Americans who were “getting mad as hell, and not going to take [it] anymore” envisioned a national hero who could restore national pride. Circumstances were ripe for a resurrection of the frontier myth with a substantively different agenda and emphasis. The Republicans saw their opportunity and quickly pounced.[41]

Chapter 4

THE HINGE

RONALD REAGAN AND THE CONSERVATIVE RESURGENCE OF THE FRONTIER MYTH

I’ve been looking forward to coming home to the Great American West. While Washington, as usual, seems paralyzed by handwringers, the people here are filled with . . . frontier spirit. You and your forebears tamed a wild frontier. . . . So now load up the musket and help us conquer this wild growth and centralization of power which threatens all that we’ve created. . . . We share the overriding philosophy that individual freedom, individual integrity, and individual ingenuity made us the greatest country the world has ever known. . . . Together we’ll make America great again.

—Ronald Reagan, Cheyenne, Wyoming, 1982

Sometimes mythical narratives and social structures become so battered by unforeseen historical events that they collapse. Certainly this happened to the liberal frontier cowboy myth so prominent in LBJ’s early presidency. Under the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, the frontier myth and associated ideology of liberal progressivism would together recede from the American mind and politics. But while the myth was out of sight it was not dead. Rather, it was simply too weakened by the events of the mid-to late 1960s to protect its own core features and so became susceptible to reformulation in a new shape at the hands of a new political collective that drew from it what suited their aims and in the process gave it a new and conservative form. At the outset of the 1980s, many Americans longed for a mythic hero who could restore national pride. When the myth was resurrected in 1980, it would no longer be as a touchstone of liberal presidents but instead as a key symbol of the conservative Reagan Revolution. Over a period of a dozen years, the frontier myth’s structure would undergo a greater climatic shift than during any transition period since the late nineteenth century.

Walter R. Fisher wrote that President Ford defeated former actor and former California governor Ronald Reagan at the Republican National Convention in 1976 because Reagan was perceived as “someone who ‘shoots from the hip,’ a man of action”; but in 1980 Reagan arguably was victorious for the same reason.[1] Former editor of the Texas Observer Jim Hightower referred to Reagan as a “disgruntled maverick”: an iconic figure of the heroic frontiersman whom the little guy could depend on in the fight against big bureaucracy and big government. Reagan would do this by encouraging individual initiative, self-reliance, freedom, and independence from government. The former governor’s own political themes appeared like something from an earlier time as he pledged to lead Americans back to their traditional and exceptional values—and their rightful position as leader of the Free World: an omnipotent righteous cause would replace good intentions. Ronald Reagan would become the presidential leader and symbol of the nation’s conservative, nostalgic drive to restore an imaginary vanished past.[2]

Picking up on some of the same themes that Richard Nixon introduced, the Republicans sought to frame the public image of Democratic liberalism as a party of war, lawlessness, and weak-kneed policies. Conversely, Reagan came to personify the perceived strengths of modern conservatism: a philosophy touted as having the right prescription for defeating economic stagflation at home and standing up to the Soviet menace and other international outlaws abroad. A man in Wichita Falls, Texas, LBJ’s neck of the woods, wrote to Reagan that he and others were “sick, sick, sick and disenchanted with the whole picture in Washington. We want someone up there with the guts to buck the establishment, clean house and make a really honest effort to reinstate an old-fashioned honorable government for the people.”[3] Another voter from Brownwood, Texas, who only identified himself in his letter to the editor as “old Cowboy,” described the Lone Star State’s political attitude as follows: “Hell, most everybody around here calls themselves a Democrat, but that don’t mean they’re a bunch of crazy liberals.” Then he went into attack mode on the incumbent president. “Carter’s ruined our defense position,” he wrote. “He’s let some dinky little country push us around and kidnap our people. He’s sacrificed our farmers with his wheat embargo and ruined our economy while he runs giveaway programs. . . . Maybe Reagan can turn things around.”[4] Such views reflected a belief that Reagan was the antithesis of establishment politics. And cultural conservatives—including westerners, southerners, and blue-collar workers—had increasingly come to view and denounce the national Democratic Party as a voice for special interests (an image once held by elite, country-club Republicans), racial minorities, and radical thinkers. At the same time, the more that Jimmy Carter was associated with failure, the more failure was associated with liberalism, and liberalism associated with the Democratic Party—thus completing the circle. Reagan and his handlers were able to transform the vision of conservatism while negatively redefining liberalism as a failed philosophy. The Republican strategists’ combined a variety of issues into one mass problem of alleged incompetence, big government, and lack of moral leadership. In Theodore Roosevelt’s day, the frontier myth had been deployed to combat monopolistic power and greedy corporations; the federal government was there to champion the rights of “regular” Americans. Now Reagan and company had seemingly turned this perception around, insisting that a bloated federal government and not corporate vested power was the biggest threat to the nation’s frontier values and Americans’ pioneering spirit. In so doing the Republicans managed to convince some swing voters who had never viewed the GOP as trustworthy and as only a friend of the rich that Reagan was on their side.[5]

Remarkably, many of Reagan’s arguments would vary little if at all from those promoted by Barry Goldwater in 1964, but Reagan had a distinct advantage over his old mentor and friend that scholars to date have not acknowledged: a revamped, conservative version of the frontier myth that he and his campaign staffers tapped into and perpetuated through its old-new platform and Reagan’s own image as a western cowboy. Conscious that Goldwater’s straight-shooter, pessimistic, gaff-ridden approach had turned away potential voters, Reagan surrounded himself with handlers who, from the latter part of the 1960s onward, were carefully recrafting Reagan’s persona to make his ideas sound much more reasonable to moderate Republicans and independents. Relatedly, Reagan tapped into a key fundamental of the frontier myth and thesis that Ray Allen Billington had identified: optimism. Making the most of his effective communication skills, Reagan (“the Great Communicator”) would convince many Americans that their nation could, as in the frontier past, face any future challenge. Instead of a grumpy and fear-mongering Goldwater-like persona, the friendlier cowboy Reagan projected an optimistic temperament when promoting his belief that less government would tap the nation’s eternal potential and enhance its basic virtues. Here Reagan was taking the sunny, can-do TR and LBJ style of liberal frontier trope and reshaping it to conservative ideals. In this sense, Marshall Sahlins and others examining the dynamics between structure and event have provided us with theoretical and interpretive tools to assist us in interpreting the context for this change. In the anxiety-ridden era spanning from the late LBJ to Carter administrations, an avalanche of perceived national failures caused the entire frontier myth to shift sharply to the right and take on a new form from which Reagan and his supporters stood to benefit the most.

Ronald Reagan had the look of a cowboy conservative. Fisher observed that many Americans found their quest for a hero in this transplanted midwesterner who now seemed even more the California–far westerner than folks who were born there (including Nixon): “He aroused a consciousness not of the stevedore, the athlete, or the truck driver, but the quintessential hero of the West—the town marshal. Accenting this image were his origins, the West (California—the last frontier), his penchant for western garb, his ranch, his pastime of riding horses, several of his film and television roles, and his physical appearance: tall, lank, and rugged. Like the savior of the West, he exuded honesty and sincerity, innocence, optimism, and certainty.” The Reagan image was carefully crafted in accordance with many of the same frontier qualities that Turner espoused. Reagan had supreme confidence and self-reliance in his economic theories, and unlike the grim Goldwater of 1964 he possessed supreme optimism for the country, was resilient and virile, and constantly described his proposed policies and “initiatives” in a kind of spirit of adventure. In these respects, Reagan was being more faithful to the frontier myth than any of his conservative predecessors—including Goldwater. Further, Reagan was a kind of politician-frontiersman who would directly challenge what was once again perceived as the corrupting and phony complexity of eastern institutions. LBJ, the promoter of the public good, would be replaced by Ronald Reagan, the deregulator and protector of capitalist freedom so sought after by big business. For Reaganites, promoting individualism did not involve protection of one’s rights and welfare within society but instead meant independence from government controls.[6]

Middle-class conservative Americans, in particular, welcomed Reagan’s self-assurance, critique of the Washington establishment, and promise of rejuvenation. Americans were being told they could regain their youth by electing a person who would be the oldest president in their history. As a symbolic embodiment of American values, Reagan would renew the nation’s past by resuming it. In John Wayne’s America, historian Garry Wills described some of the parallels between Reagan’s appeal and that of his friend John Wayne, “the Duke.” Like the movie version of Wayne, Reagan managed to capture on his political speaking circuit an aura of the old American West. Reagan’s oratory was frequently nostalgic, harkening back to the Founding Fathers or pioneers who led the fight for “maximum freedom for the individual.”[7] Further, Reagan positioned himself as a regular-folks candidate—angry about corruption and incompetence in government; longing for the good old days of the nostalgic frontier, “traditional” family values, the right to bear arms without government interference, and free-market individualism; and the champion of strength in the face of vacillating liberals. Reagan’s illusionary vision of the past was not challenged to near the degree it could have been, arguably because the public would rather not come to terms with its real past and instead preferred Reagan’s sunny substitute. In addition, Ronald Reagan’s visions seemed more believable because they fit a newly revised structure of the frontier myth that he believed in so much himself.

As noted, the Democratic Party had dominated presidential politics for much of the twentieth century. While the GOP had been viewed as a party dominated by a rich and elitist establishment with its power base in the Northeast’s country clubs and some of the more reactionary regions of the Midwest, Democrats were thought to represent the interests of hardworking and patriotic regular folk. But by the end of the Johnson administration and through the 1970s many conservative Americans perceived a decline in family values, a weak and demoralized military, and a bungling and dishonest federal government. Johnson and Carter were portrayed by Reagan’s team as having tarnished the American Dream by failing to live up to its alleged ideals. By 1980 the pendulum of the frontier myth had swung so far to the right that when asked the ambiguous question of which party would make America “great once again,” the majority now answered that it would be Reagan’s Republicans.[8]

On the night before the 1980 election, Reagan bought time on national television to tell Americans, “Not so long ago, we emerged from a world war. Turning homeward at last, we built a grand prosperity and hoped—from our own success and plenty—to help others less fortunate. . . . Then came the hard years: riots and assassinations, domestic strife over the Vietnam War and in the last four years, drift and disaster in Washington.” Reagan had been bashing Carter all year for letting America’s defense get soft by cutting the B-1 bomber program, continuing the post–Vietnam War reduction in the number of naval vessels, cutting special deals with the Soviets and appeasing the Reds, and using his “big, liberal government” to threaten “the American way of life.” Reagan’s use of words like “freedom,” “appeasement,” and “weaken” deliberately provoked emotional responses and created a sense of urgency in the minds of Republicans and independents, many of whom came to see liberals as extremists who were as dangerous to the well-being of their society as Goldwater had appeared to independents and Democrats in 1964. Significantly, Goldwater had hit on very similar arguments as Reagan during the former’s own frontier campaign of 1964—but the Arizona senator was then feared as a kooky cowboy and, consequently, destroyed at the polling booths by LBJ.[9] By 1980, events had transformed the structure of the frontier myth so radically from that of the mid-1960s that an ultraconservative (Reagan) now appeared more reasonable to the national electorate than did an alleged “crazy liberal” (Carter).[10] The Vietnam experience in particular, along with urban violence and decay, Watergate, Iran, and a lengthy economic recession had changed the nature and emphasis of the western myth and got a conservative frontier up and running. Unable to sustain itself under the force of these powerful events, a new myth structure featuring a conservative philosophy and explanatory narrative for “right-thinking” Americans was forming just as the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign began hitting its stride. On Election Day, Reagan bushwhacked Carter at the polling booth, capturing forty-four states and defeating an incumbent president for the first time since FDR trounced Herbert Hoover in 1932. As historian Sean Cunningham has argued, Carter ultimately lost out in the image war with Reagan largely because conservatism was pitched effectively as patriotic and practical while liberalism was now increasingly viewed as the antifrontier philosophy—malaise-ridden, extreme, and failed.[11]

After three unsuccessful tries for the White House, Ronald Reagan finally made it in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine—taking all but six states and DC. During the campaign, cowboy Reagan hit hard at Carter’s economic policies, blaming him for “runaway” inflation and unemployment. (Dick Locher, Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1980. Permission of Mary C. Locher and Jana Locher Evans)

THE HINGE

Twelve years after Johnson left office, the elderly new president, Ronald Reagan, rode into the White House on the coattails of a frontier explanation for American society that had been shaken to its core and was now looking backward in time—or at least back to an America as it “should have been.” The long-standing progressive frontier myth went sour for Democrats with Vietnam, race riots, and related economic troubles, which many blamed on the LBJ administration. The frontier myth could no longer accommodate the numerous crises and realities of the late 1960s, and cowboy Johnson had to go. Then western connections to the presidency faded during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years until conservative Ronald Reagan vied for the presidency in 1980 on a campaign selling pure strength. Once in office, Reagan and his handlers tapped into powerful myths and symbols to promote policies but chose vastly different emphases on this imagery than LBJ. Reaganites were going to rely on so-called American tradition, an alternative lifestyle to what was ailing the country based on the simple truths of the Old West: individualism, self-reliance, know-how, and higher values. Reagan as a western hero did not answer to regulators and bureaucratic red tape; he offered straight solutions. Reagan was going to shoot down all those impersonal forces at home, especially “big-spending liberals” and government bureaucrats who were restricting, scheduling, supervising, directing, and frustrating their daily existence. He was going to put America back on top economically and stand tall against the menacing Communists and Iranian students who had embarrassed the United States and supposedly weakened America’s respect among other nations in the world. In 1980 the California cowboy’s most famous campaign slogan succinctly captured his return to the frontier philosophy: “Reagan: Let’s Make America Great Again.”

A shift took place: the hinge from Reagan to LBJ, two political practitioners who came down at diametrically opposite poles. One called for more government intervention, the other called for much less—both counted on the frontier myth to deliver. Turner had argued that the two American qualities of tolerance and individualism are in perpetual conflict. The two greatest achievements of the frontier—the construction of a libertarian American individual and the creation of diverse, politically equal democratic communities—were frequently opposed to one another. Johnson chose to emphasize tolerance and a national agenda based on equality as opposed to regional policies and values; Reagan then moved the emphasis to the opposite pole—toward Goldwater-like libertarian individualism and states’ rights. LBJ projected frontier imagery forward in time, and Reagan projected it backward. A dichotomy developed here, and with it the discourse shifted; the myth, or at very least its emphasis, adopted and changed. By 1981 the philosophy in the White House as it related to the frontier myth was becoming narrower, less flexible, and conservative. Johnson’s attempts to bring the full frontier myth forward collapsed, and after the myth initially receded into the background, a reactionary, nostalgic way of understanding America replaced the more forward-thinking, progressive approach. The version that Reagan espoused is a reasserted structure that looked to the past to create an argument that the myth had been revitalized by returning to what it originally was, or was supposed to have been. The Reagan presidency and emergence of Reagan as an icon can best be understood not simply as a resurgence of American conservatism—the usual historic explanation—but in the context of a restructured and reoriented version of the frontier myth in the face of domestic and international events.

REAGAN’S EARLY YEARS IN POLITICS

To better understand Reagan’s presidential relationship to the myth, we need first to explore this association over his life and career prior to arriving in the Oval Office. Like so many Californians of his generation, Ronald Reagan came from somewhere else. A transplant from Illinois, he moved to the Pacific Coast while in his twenties. Reagan became a born-again westerner who later went back east as president to bring the mythic rejuvenating powers of the frontier to American political life. For many believers in the rejuvenated and restructured myth, including Reagan himself, the East had become a kind of Europe incarnate: decaying, stale, and corrupt.

Over the course of his political career, Ronald Reagan consistently deployed frontier symbolism and myth in accordance with his own needs and political objectives—making heavy use of it during his years as governor of California and, in particular, as US president. Reagan also had an angle on promoting western symbolism and myth that previous presidents did not. As a movie actor who signed with Warner Brothers in 1937—the same year that LBJ entered Congress—Reagan was a professional at acting, memorizing movie script lines, following his directors, and conveying symbolism as the message. What is surprising to many today is that while all but one of Reagan’s fifty-three Hollywood movies showed him in a heroic or best-friend role, only six were westerns.[12] Reagan’s cowboy persona was fully launched by his two-year, mid-1960s gig as host and occasional star on Death Valley Days, “Where the historical West comes alive.” Taken from a 1930s radio series, the TV version ran continuously from 1952 through the early 1970s, and in 1965–66 Reagan appeared every week to introduce episodes dressed, appropriately, in cowboy attire. But for Reagan the outfit was not just a costume. If he had been denied the opportunity to star in more westerns during his movie career, he acted this out in his private life, having chosen the lifestyle of a gentleman-rancher, and in his politics. From that time forward Reagan methodically worked to personally and politically identify himself with those roles that he himself had wanted to star in most[13] and later wished to project to the electorate—especially that of the all-American cowboy, an archetype of the Old West. Naturally Reagan and his political handlers wanted his image to be linked to those positive values that the western hero represented: virtuous manliness, individualism, patriotism, and various other frontier and small-town values. Today it is difficult to imagine Reagan in one of his other roles as an architect, concert pianist, college professor, social worker, or insurance adjuster.[14]

Along with the initial movie-cowboy angle, this study contends that Reagan’s successful political career was based in large part on a longing that many Americans had for the good old days. His ideas about pioneering individualism, mobility, and personal autonomy struck a responsive chord with many Americans—even though they seemed hardly fitting in a highly industrialized and increasingly urbanized twentieth-century society (other Americans, to Reagan’s benefit, had contradictions too). Reagan was, in many respects, a nineteenth-century man who still preached the unlikely conservative combination of rugged individualism along with a constant haranguing for the establishment of law and order.

Ronald Reagan and his team’s skillful response to the changing structure of the frontier myth was a key ingredient to the rising Republican’s persona and a major foundation for his presidential campaigns in 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984, and served to reinforce the change as well. In all of his campaigns through 1980, Reagan as both gubernatorial and presidential candidate represented an anti-Johnson figure who opposed “big government” (except in the area of defense spending) and opposed or sought to cut back almost all that the Great Society entailed, from school lunch programs to civil rights to conservation. Contrary to Johnson’s attempt to continue “the progressive, community spirit of the pioneers,” frontier cowboy Reagan would rely on so-called American tradition based on individualism and other simple truths of the Old West. This played much better to the national audience in 1980—still stinging from Vietnam, still reeling from the Iran hostage situation, and still struggling with post–OPEC crisis high energy costs—than it had in Reagan’s previous campaigns. But it was not these crises that ostensibly caused the shift in American attitudes that Reagan necessarily highlighted and attacked; rather it was the old Republican chestnut of big government and interfering bureaucracy. Reagan told TV viewers on election eve in 1980 that “Americans, who have always known that bureaucracy is the enemy of excellence and compassion, want a change in public life—a change that makes government work for the people.”[15] The reluctant gunman from the Far West who (like some modern-day Cincinnatus) would willingly give up his tranquil retirement on the ranch promised voters that, if elected, he would stand tall and defeat all those impersonal forces at home, especially “tax-and-spend liberals” and government bureaucrats who were restricting, scheduling, supervising, directing, and frustrating Americans’ daily existence. Economic stagflation and threats to America’s preeminence in the world were all the fault of those who had misunderstood the lessons of the frontier experience, especially Lyndon Johnson. “I am trying to undo the ‘Great Society,’” Reagan recorded in his diary. “It was L.B.J.’s war on poverty that led to our present mess.”[16] With regard to foreign policy, Reagan charged that LBJ and Carter had committed the sin of undermining the belief that America was a favored nation by losing in Vietnam, allowing the Soviets to run rampant in Afghanistan, and permitting Iranian students to embarrass the United States. All of this mayhem, he said, had weakened respect for America and made it a pitiful giant in the eyes of other nations of the world. He summed up his own return-to-the-glories-of-the-frontier philosophy succinctly with his two most famous campaign slogans: the previously mentioned “Reagan: Let’s Make America Great Again,” and later his triumphant “It’s Morning Again in America” in 1984.

REAGAN AS A COWBOY HERO

As the nation came to terms with the recent traumas of the war in Vietnam, economic woes, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis, the United States once again appeared in search of itself, which arguably fed into the nation’s increasing reattachment to the frontier myth—only now it was a conservative presidential candidate who stood to benefit most from its revised structure. Republican Party campaigners and handlers worked diligently to depict their candidate in the guise of a frontier cowboy during a period in American history when the public yearned for a frontier type who could pull the nation out of its perceived woeful malaise, and Reagan embodied American western mythology more than any other contenders for the White House since Johnson and Goldwater. Symbolism was key to Reagan’s success. His iconic image as the conservative cowboy capable of meeting any challenge or defeating any foe was summed up in a 1980 campaign poster, with Marlboro Country having been replaced by the slogan “America: Reagan Country.” At the center of the image is a smiling Ronald Reagan in a white Stetson with an open-necked denim shirt, while behind him in a haze are images of the flag, the Statue of Liberty, a rustic church, the family farm, and Monument Valley. It was as though time had been turned back and the Hollywood directors of near forgotten 1930s B-westerns had been resurrected to design Reagan’s public relations campaign. Reagan used the revised frontier myth with a great deal of success because he was able to align his presidential image with that of the quintessentially American figure and hero—the cowboy—and, even more importantly, match up his own right-wing ideology with the revised vision of America’s westering experience. As Gary L. Gregg asserted, “No presidency relied more upon visual images and symbolic moments than Reagan’s.”[17]

Throughout his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan projected an image that appealed to many American voters during a time when America’s military prowess was challenged by the USSR and its economic prowess by Japan. Reagan the cowboy was a strong, unapologetic, and most of all heroic leader type: an image that none of his political rivals, whether Republicans like George H. W. Bush or Democrats like Jimmy Carter, were able to project.[18] America had lost a war in Vietnam, been humiliated in Iran, and was falling behind, so went the perception, for the very reasons Frederick Jackson Turner had feared—because the country had become urban, intellectual, and flabby. A perceived lack of national discipline was leading to a sense of drift. Some of the same fears and anxieties experienced in TR’s day resurfaced with a vengeance during the Reagan period, and once again the nation looked to the virile and manly virtues of the frontier for answers. Only this time this toughness and virility were not needed to rid the nation of corporate corruption and excesses through a bolstering of federal government powers: instead the new, transformed frontier myth had become a reversal of this earlier accepted wisdom that had prevailed during TR’s and into LBJ’s time in office. On Inauguration Day 1981, a New York Times editorialist described how many Americans hoped that Reagan would fulfill the new demands of the myth: “The metaphor seems inevitable,” Robert Lindsey observed, “a cowboy in full regalia moves on Washington from out of the West, looking grim and ready for battle with the gang of looters that has taken over the town. He fights for individual liberty, the free enterprise system and a Federal Government that will get off the backs of the people.”[19]

This 1980 poster of “kook-right” Reagan in gunfighter stance (left) was originally deployed by his political opponents, with some effectiveness, in 1968. With the newly transformed frontier myth now working more to Reagan’s advantage, however, the most prolific Reagan ’80 cowboy poster (right) replaced “Marlboro Country” with the slogan “America: Reagan Country.” (Left: Vic Dinnerstein, The Fascist Gun in the West, Photograph: Universal Pictures, 1980, offset poster. Reprinted with permission of the Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics; 9470; right: From the author’s collection)

Interestingly, though, Reagan himself had started out as a New Deal Democrat. His distaste for federal income tax (after he earned a salary of $1 million and had a multiyear contract with Warner Brothers in the mid-1940s) and for liberal leftists within the Screen Actors Guild (a union that he headed) apparently caused him to alter radically his political polarity during the 1950s to become a hard-right libertarian.[20] Now Hollywood symbols took on a kind of radical individualism that Reagan relished: not only were these heroes the old good-versus-evil types of his youth, characters like Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo also attempted to confront the receded myth of frontier masculinity by rehabilitating it and replaying the Vietnam War. As president, Reagan himself enjoyed taunting his domestic liberal enemies with Clint Eastwood’s warning in his film role as Detective Harry Callahan—“Go ahead, make my day”—as he vowed to veto tax increases in 1985 (which Reagan then requested in the next budget).[21] On screen, Dirty Harry runs down punks who have made the city a crime-ridden jungle using tactics prohibited by an overregulated and ineffective police force. His Smith and Wesson revolvers get bigger with each film as he fulfills a need to blow away entire structures of evil, not just individual bad guys. Reagan vowed to employ these alleged frontier values and tactics to rid America’s friends of Communists abroad, America’s streets of criminals at home, and the federal government of vacillating liberalism. The Reagan era would come to represent the heyday of presidential cowboy conservatism.

COWBOY REAGAN’S RANCH IN THE SKY

During his presidential years, Reagan’s rugged western image was most visible in the fifty trips that he and his wife, Nancy, took to Rancho del Cielo (Ranch in the sky), where he spent fully one year of his eight-year presidency. The press delivered regular television footage of the president at his 688-acre “Western White House” near Santa Barbara, California. While campaigning in 1980 and during his two terms in office, many of the activities and tasks that Reagan performed at the ranch—riding horses in cowboy garb, clearing brush, mending fences, and signing legislation—were choreographed by his own press team and offered broad and simple metaphors for what he had pledged to do to restore order to his land as the commander in chief. Reagan was depicted as the rugged individualist on horseback or a fence builder with chainsaw in hand who worked the land independent of outside help to build something worthwhile out of the scrub brush of the Santa Barbara hills.[22]

The Reagan and LBJ ranches, like their respective owners, are in many ways a study in contrasts. Both presidents went to their ranches frequently to recharge and ride horses, but at that point the similarities end. Unlike the functioning LBJ Ranch, the only cattle at Reagan’s ranch during his presidency were two Longhorns kept as family pets: Duke and Duchess. In a reversal of LBJ’s comfortable, high-tech home at Stonewall, Rancho del Cielo had only the most basic of features: no furnace (staffers could be seen regularly stoking fireplaces in the living and family rooms), no bathtub, no dishwasher, and a dated roof antenna for the TV. Reagan never wanted to modernize and deliberately avoided doing so. While the LBJ Ranch had reveled in presidential trappings and celebrated the executive office, Reagan’s ranch was utterly void of them, save the white phone in the bedroom with a direct line to the Secret Service and the Reagans’ choice of address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With a few exceptions (and most of them famous: George H. W. and Barbara Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, and Brian and Mila Mulroney), the Reagans hosted very few guests, rarely inviting senior advisers or even their own children to stay there. The ranch was, and remains to this day, filled with sketches of cowboys on horseback, often lone figures on the prairie. One observer has suggested that Reagan’s choice in ranch art reflected his own state of mind when he placed them on the walls in the mid-1970s: that of a lone conservative rider wandering the plains.[23]

Johnson’s and Reagan’s adherence to vastly different versions of the frontier myth were so deep seated that these convictions were even evident in the choice of physical surroundings. While Johnson associated western imagery with progress, ongoing improvements, and the exploration of the frontiers of the future, Reagan’s vision of returning America to greatness reached back in time to reinvigorate the present by making it more resemble what was still commonly perceived as his nation’s traditional and ideal way of life. More importantly, for the purposes of this study, the frontier message now interacted with a conservative political agenda as well.

THE MYTH AND NOSTALGIC CONSERVATISM

On social issues ranging from school prayer to sex education, Ronald Reagan was committed to values that he saw as governing America in the past. As discussed in previous chapters, LBJ could also be cavalier in the way he understood the history of the West and the pioneering-frontier experience. But the lessons for which Johnson used them were dramatically different from Reagan’s—and even more so than his frontier-president predecessors, Reagan seemed to have an open preference for myth over his consideration of events both in the present and the past.

Reagan paid little attention to the historical West. His view and descriptions of the past were typically ahistorical and sometimes fictional, selective, and chosen for dramatic effect. Most of all they were driven by priorities of a conservative view of the frontier myth. In their study Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House, psychiatrists Steven J. Rubenzer and Thomas R. Faschingbauer working in conjunction with several presidential historians characterized Reagan as the most fantasy driven of all the presidents. “Reagan,” their study asserted, “tended to ‘accept as fact any opinion, story, or rumor that tended to support his own point of view.’”[24] While this is arguably true for most leaders, Reagan—possibly because of his acting career—appears to have been especially prone to this weakness. For example, Reagan was evaluated by Rubenzer, Faschingbauer, and the presidential historians as the president most prone to daydream and as a man who reflects on major problems and issues “from the standpoint of what John Wayne would do.”[25]

Reagan would also discuss proposed initiatives—such as the extremely complex and expensive Strategic Defense Initiative—as if they were already up and running; would demonize America’s enemies (particularly the Soviets); and, in retrospect, appears to have suffered bouts of forgetfulness from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Wilbur Edel once demonstrated at length that the president possessed a remarkable “ignorance of history” and penchant for “acceptance of fantasy in place of fact.”[26] Even more than LBJ (and, arguably, to a much greater degree than the learned president TR), Reagan seemed prone to allowing the structures of the frontier myth to accommodate and therefore interpret contemporary events themselves, with the conservative version of the myth remaining steadily paramount in his thinking and actions as president. Relatedly, for Reagan, what was most important about American history was not what might provide clues to solutions for the complex challenges of modern America, but what could be used to overcome these complexities. Contemporary problems, as Reagan saw them, were the result of the nation’s abandonment of the values that had made the country “great” in the past. He looked back with sincerity and faith to an America as “it should have been.” “If the legend becomes fact,” to quote from film director John Ford’s self-reflexive The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Reagan believed that America needed to “print the legend.”[27]

Interestingly, the influence of movies on Reagan’s thinking has been observed elsewhere by Lou Cannon and other biographers, but of interest for this study is that Ronald and Nancy Reagan watched numerous westerns at Camp David during their eight years in Washington, including many featuring their friends “Duke” Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. Among the John Wayne westerns the Reagans screened were Big Jake, Chisum, Red River, Rio Bravo, Rooster Cogburn, and The Searchers; those starring Jimmy Stewart included Destry Rides Again, How the West Was Won, The Man from Laramie, and Winchester ’73 (twice). Reagan would sometimes work descriptions of the scenes or plots from western movies into his speeches in the days and weeks after he viewed them, as he did during his 1988 visit to Moscow when he compared perestroika to the scene where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid jump off a cliff. During their final year in the White House, 1988–89, the Reagans watched eight westerns at Camp David, including two horse operas featuring Reagan himself that had served his political image so well: Santa Fe Trail and the last film viewed before heading back to California, Cattle Queen of Montana (shown January 14, 1989).[28] As David Murdoch keenly observed, “What is remarkable is that [Reagan’s] version of the myth is so inextricably entangled with movie images, so that one has replaced the other. . . . For Reagan, films did not reflect history, history reflected movies.”[29]

Reagan’s own preference for myth over actual events is also evident in his correspondence. In a letter that the president wrote to a young disabled man, Peter Aviles of Caldwell, Idaho, on January 28, 1985, Reagan referred to himself as a “history buff” with a “main interest in the American West.” He continued, “As some historian put it, it was the most unusual march of empire in world history. It wasn’t led by the military but by settlers who bet their lives and the lives of their families as they opened up the west in the face of hardship and hostile Indians.”[30] The president acknowledged his own mythic understanding of the West and both promoted and defended this limited view by emphasizing its moral function. When Reagan opened the American Cowboy exhibit at the Library of Congress in 1983, he applauded the “ideals of courageous and self-reliant heroes, both men and women,” which “are the stuff of Western lore.” Then he explained through reference to a “noted historian” (Henry Steele Commager) that “Americans, in making their [w]estern myths, were not put off by discrepancies with reality. Americans believed about the West not so much what was true, but what they thought ought to be true.” He continued, “Lacking the common heritage that bound other nations together, they were forced to look elsewhere for the basis of their national existence. And they found it,” thankfully, in Reagan’s view, “in the West.”[31]

Whether fully conscious of it or not, Reagan and his administration were offering a counterthrust against the “New Western History” and now reclaimed the frontier, even a less than real one, as good, right, and proper. When the optimistic conservative Reagan told Americans that “our best days are ahead of us,” he meant that the future would be better because under his leadership the spirit of enterprise and adventure would be imported from the past.[32] As Reagan wrote in his autobiography, “I thought then, and I think now, that the brief post–Civil War era when our blue-clad cavalry stayed on a war-time footing against the plains and desert Indians was a phase of Americana rivaling the Kipling era of color and romance.”[33] The former actor not only wished to revive the spirit of the nation, he wanted to “resurrect” his idealized and sentimental vision of the past.[34]

In the aftermath of the tumultuous late 1960s and 1970s, Reagan’s comfort level with historical neglect and adherence to a new right-wing revision of the frontier myth met with a generally receptive American audience. As historian Ray Allen Billington told the New York Times in 1981, a popular myth emerged that “the frontier was a land of unrestrained liberty, where the individual was supreme and law was dispensed out a holster instead of a law book. It really wasn’t like that.” Billington explained, “But people believe the myth that was created . . . and Reagan has come to personify those things: they aren’t true but it doesn’t matter because people think they are.”[35] Reagan the candidate and president communicated in simple terms—through patriotic, uplifting, and often imaginary western stories, metaphors, films, and anecdotes to promote a vastly different agenda from that of LBJ, including law and order, family values, tough talk in dealing with the Soviet Union, a guns-over-butter approach to government spending, libertarianism and individualism over civil rights and inclusion, and (at least rhetorically) a reduction of the size and role of the federal government in American life.

In Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, several authors exploring visual representations of the West observed that the frontier myths of discovery, the adventuring spirit of the pioneers, tough individualism, and self-reliance, are rooted too deeply in the American psyche to be eliminated by historical “fact.” And as Brian Dippie demonstrated through his study of the “vanishing American,” myths have consequences. The dominance of myth over fact and the influence of myth-based beliefs in shaping the actions of the chief executive would prove as evident during the Reagan years as they had during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson; only this time, events of the previous decade had caused changes to the mythic structure that would result in a right-wing reorientation of federal policies and programs. As I contend in chapter 5, the conservative frontier myth of the 1980s and the politics, policies, and nature of the Reagan Revolution were inexorably linked.[36]

REAGAN AS CONSERVATIVES’ FRONTIER ANTIDOTE TO LBJ

Earlier chapters explore how Lyndon Johnson and his 1964 campaign team characterized Barry Goldwater as a reckless, selfish, and irresponsible cowboy who did not live up to the frontier values of the postwar generation. Given Ronald Reagan’s similar, if much smoother platform on the issues, one might assume that had he ever run against Reagan, LBJ would have taken a similar tack.

But during the late 1960s and afterward, then–California governor Reagan had plenty to say about Democratic president Johnson: in fact Reagan soon became arguably the most effective of the Republican LBJ-bashers in the Southwest. On speaking tours in California, Texas, and other frontier states, Reagan then portrayed himself as being on a “crusade for the people.” In contrast to the liberal establishment, he attacked LBJ’s Great Society as “having been set up in opposition to the vast majority of American interests, linked this to Johnson’s widening credibility gap . . . blamed LBJ’s social policies for the formation of radical left splinter groups,” and called “upon LBJ to do more, not less, to win the war in Vietnam.”[37] Two decades later this same line of attack was used by Reagan in regard to the Democratic Party’s vision. In 1988, at a fundraising dinner in Houston, now-president Reagan used cowboy talk to chide “the Democrats . . . once proud-party which used to stand for economic growth at home and expanding the frontiers abroad—a proud bull with a passion for justice and liberty.” Now, Reagan insisted, after years of weak, liberal leadership, the party he had once belonged to had allegedly been reduced to “a stampeded steer, cowed by special interests at home and enemies of freedom abroad.”[38] In an article published in The Nation, “The Age of Reaganism,” liberal journalist Andrew Kopkind described the overall values of Reagan’s cowboy code as one that valued private and not public institutions—apart from the masculine element, the very antithesis of most of the values promoted by LBJ: “competitive enterprise over collective endeavor, the family unit over the heterogeneous community . . . patriotism over internationalism, selfishness over altruism, having over sharing.”[39] For Reagan, the implications for the frontier myth were clear: LBJ had not cowboyed up to the traditional values of individualism, self-reliance, and America’s duty to face down and defeat the bad guys from behind the barrel of a Smith and Wesson. LBJ had failed the myth. Reagan had taken advantage of and would reinforce the new rightest structure through programs that changed and even reversed the liberal trajectory that had shaped the administrations of the earlier frontier presidents.

Chapter 5

REAGAN’S POLICY FRONTIERS AT HOME AND ABROAD

Yes, the choice before the American people this year is just as clear as it was in 1980 and 1984: a choice between, on the one hand, liberal policies of tax and spend; gun control; economic stagnation; international weakness; and always, always “blame America first”; and on the other hand, what we believe—the policies of limited government, economic growth, individual opportunity, a strong defense, firmness with the Soviets, and always, always, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.”

America has saddled up. . . . We’re keeping a promise that is as old as this land we love and as big as the sky. We need you to put on your spurs and ride with us.

—President Reagan, campaigning for George H. W. Bush, 1988

The conservative contours of the transformed frontier myth were both deliberately and subconsciously mirrored in the policies, programs, and ideology of the Reagan administration. Events of the late 1960s and 1970s had caused a shift in the myth’s emphasis that appeared a near eclipsing of those national priorities that had allowed LBJ to soundly defeat Barry Goldwater in the presidential contest of 1964. Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 as the “Great Emancipator,” but Reagan was not campaigning in support of civil rights or antipoverty legislation; instead he was selling his right-wing pledge to free Americans from economic stagflation, the legacies of Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis, and most of all, the restraining hands of liberals.

Events of the previous decade and a half had overturned the liberal frontier myth and replaced it with a conservative one as events not only affected structure, but the structure would shape events. As Marshall Sahlins contended, the two were mutually informing. With “Reaganomics,” new capital released through tax cuts and deregulation was promised to bring back to the American economy the rapid expansion and high growth rates of the past that Turner’s frontier thesis had once said were made possible through the continual expansion of the frontier into regions rich in natural resources. Reagan would also initiate the largest peacetime military buildup in US history and a Strategic Defense Initiative program both as a “big stick” to use against the allegedly expansionist Soviets and to restore America’s position as the world’s undisputed number-one superpower. Reagan’s 1980s was a decade of national renewal and national excess. The decade was also characterized by restorative nostalgia: the desire to return to the good old days (which the frontier was now understood as representing), a rebirth in national pride, and in its darker manifestations, a search for black hats to be defeated so that the imagined homeland of the past could be restored. It is no coincidence that the president’s policy actions paralleled so closely the values and symbolism of the resurgent myth of the frontier, a vision that, having recently been transformed, came once again to be perceived as offering an explanation for the entire American experience.

This said, adherence to the revised frontier myth created challenges and problems for Reagan and his team when events challenged the structure they had ridden to the White House. As explored here, the “Sagebrush Rebellion” over the control of public lands at first seemed to tie Reagan’s stance most closely to the idea of the American frontier as a focal point of the nation’s libertarianism and democracy; it ultimately failed, however, when most of its advocates concluded that the risks of individual state over federal control outweighed the potential benefits. In 1983 the airing of a TV movie about nuclear annihilation—and a series of real-world events preceding and following its release—caused Reagan and the American public to reexamine some of their assumptions about the Cold War and the US-Soviet relationship. Meanwhile, the bombing of the Marines barracks in Lebanon that same year and the Iran-Contra scandal in the latter half of the decade would confound and frustrate Reagan. Again, as with LBJ, Reagan’s adherence to the tough, manly principles of the myth severely limited his options and brought disastrous results. Ideas had direct consequences for policy formation during the Reagan administration, but ideas cannot predict the future. Rather, the influence of ideas on policy brought sometimes unpredictable outcomes; ultimately, they were adjustments to the dominant contours of the frontier myth and, consequently, to aspects of Reaganism itself.

MORNING IN AMERICA

Ray Allen Billington had identified the frontier thesis’s most outstanding feature as optimism: one earned through Americans’ triumphant taming of the West. Ronald Reagan tapped heavily into this aspect of the myth by breaking the mold of older generations of conservatives and employing the same spirit of optimism and hope that liberals had projected—only this time in the name of conservative policies. Moreover, Reagan did this in ways that no Oval Office predecessor had done. Contrary to others in the Republican Party, including Goldwater, Reagan perceived that he could not govern the country as a pessimist. Previously, most conservatives had promoted a strand of thinking that was pessimistic and negative about human nature, but Reagan thought that raising spirits in the country was a practical way to make good things happen, including making investments, having confidence in the military, and producing children.[1]

As president, Ronald Reagan spoke optimistically of returning and restoring America to an idyllic time. Likewise, Reagan constantly invoked the past in ideal, reassuring terms, and thought he had lived through much of it. In Reagan’s depiction of the frontier past, American imperialism out west was all for the good—and in the present, social problems and disagreeable social groups (minorities, the poor, and intellectuals) were either ignored or obstacles to be pushed out of the way as part of the president’s attempt to control the future by making it into the past. Reagan’s version of the myth itself had remained an optimistic vision for real bona fide Americans, but it was a narrower, less flexible, and more exclusionary vision than had been the case in previous decades.

Nowhere were Reagan’s brand of and connections to a conservative return to the past and optimistic frontier myth made more explicit than in his presidential ad campaigns. At the 1984 Republican National Convention, and on paid TV airtime afterward, the Reagan campaign ran an eighteen-minute commercial created by ad-man extraordinaire Hal Riney and formally titled Prouder, Better, Stronger—but now more widely known as Morning in America. In choreographed footage of the president and First Lady’s trip through the Far East, Reagan tells us in a voiceover, “Our trip to Japan, Korea, and later the People’s Republic of China makes you realize that the old line ‘Go West, young man, go West,’ still fits. There’s a new frontier out there, there’s a future and the United States is going to be very much a part of that future.” Here the frontier myth and Reagan’s cowboy status are plainly evoked, as is America’s expanding role on an “international” frontier. On the South Korean edge of the DMZ, Reagan exalts as everyday heroes American troops stationed there. He appears in an army mess hall, dressed in battle fatigues. The president tells viewers, “I’ve never seen such morale, such esprit de corps, such pride in their work. All of us here at home should remember all of those young men and women on the frontiers of freedom.” For Reagan and his filmmakers, the “frontiers of freedom” phrase (also a favorite of LBJ’s) represents the outermost edge of American influence; everything within her sphere is safe, good, and civilized, but outside is unknown and potentially uncivilized. The mythic pioneer and American heroes on the frontier likewise had to fight and guard to protect the advancing civilization and also to push the frontier farther as they brought new land into America’s domain. Cattle boss Reagan and his boys on the Korean Peninsula are portrayed as paladins of the American way, fighting on the frontiers of freedom to defend democracy from all that is lying beyond the frontier with its evils of communism.[2]

Barry Goldwater was out-cowboyed by LBJ in 1964, but Reagan learned from his old friend’s mistakes. Here they meet in the Oval Office to admire an apt gift just one month after Reagan’s first inauguration. (Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library, White House Photograph Collection, Photo #795-2, Frame 4A, February 23, 1981)

As the leading man in the story of his presidency, Reagan was packaged as the political embodiment of the white-hatted frontier-cowboy hero, an active force who has arrived from outside to help right the prevailing wrongs and get the country moving again. His manliness was perceived in his tough stands on military posture, his seemingly decisive views on domestic policy, and his tall, rugged appearance. Here the president’s handlers tapped directly into the simple truths of the Old Frontier: individualism, self-reliance, higher values, and the bristling know-how of America’s advanced and potent military technology. Reagan’s Democratic opponents, meanwhile, were pushed into contrasting imagery and portrayed by those on the right as “impractical, ineffectual, and effete.”[3] Ultimately, Morning in America’s Reagan is portrayed as the sanctifier of community: he is the “natural” inheritor of the presidential office, and if Americans want the final chapter of this heroic tale to be written, then they would need to cast their vote in November to reelect Ronald Reagan as their president. His success at the polls in 1984, with the Reagan-Bush ticket winning every state except Minnesota and the District of Columbia, is a reflection of the importance of imagery in political campaigns. Frontier symbolism and myth would play a crucial role in Reagan’s presidential policy making as well.

REAGANISM AT HOME: THE FRONTIER PRINCIPLES OF FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALISM

Of all the principles that Reagan emphasized in his frontier rhetoric, freedom and individualism were perhaps the most pronounced. The president told Americans that they were a community unique in history because “we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before.”[4] As a result, Reagan would say, “Freedom and dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth.”[5] Reagan drew on a selective rightest version of the frontier myth emphasizing Turner’s “masterful grasp of material things” and American exceptionalism—two features that would become ideological pillars of his domestic and foreign policies.

A radical conservative, Ronald Reagan portrayed American history as a struggle to preserve America’s freedom, greatness, and values against major obstacles imposed by economic adversity, big government, and sinister enemies (especially Communists and terrorists). Reagan believed that Americans had always had the opportunity to achieve greatness and were better off going it alone, without outside help. The domestic evils of government regulation and taxation, and the need to maintain the nation’s military strength, always remained paramount in stories that Reagan told and heavily influenced his policies at home and abroad. He also repeatedly told Americans that if they chose to participate in the story—that is, the conservative myth structure of their era—then they would become part of their nation’s greatness.

President Reagan hailed the decentralization of government and portrayed this as harkening back to an era of unregulated individualism. His cowboy-politician image of the 1980s emphasized the handling of adversity through independence and isolated self-reliance. To bolster these attributes Reagan took the opposite approach to TR and LBJ: instead of investing in community welfare and giving impoverished people the support that liberals believe are needed to increase the level of freedom and independence, Reagan cut public assistance programs; deregulated banking, business, and environmental codes; and decentralized the federal government—all for what he told Americans was a harkening back to the old days of rugged individualism. Reagan claimed that Jimmy Carter had blamed ordinary Americans for the nation’s ills (actually Carter had asked Americans to work together to improve the situation); supposedly reversing Carter’s stance, Reagan then identified the little folks with the essential goodness of the nation. The real culprit was not the average American, Reagan insisted. “In this present crisis,” he told the nation in his first inaugural address (entirely self-written), “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”[6] Reagan poured his conservative critique on even thicker in his address of election eve in 1984, when—again sounding much like Goldwater two decades earlier—he told voters that professional politicians (or what he usually referred to as “the liberal establishment”) had poisoned the nation’s well-being: “As you worked harder to keep up with inflation, they raised your taxes. When our industries staggered, they piled on more regulations. When educational equality slumped, they piled on more bureaucratic controls. They watched crime terrorize our citizens and responded with more lenient judges, sentencing, and parole. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they punished our farmers with a grain embargo and neglected to build our defenses.”[7] Cowboy Reagan warned Americans that they faced two specific adversaries: their own government at home and the Soviet Union abroad. At home, if problems arose from earlier decisions, those were the government’s decisions—not the people’s. But through their renewed faith in their frontier heritage, Americans could stand tall to overcome impending dangers and accomplish anything.

Reagan’s frontier prescription, rooted in a construct of the imagination, was problematic in terms of late-twentieth-century realities. One of the great ironies of the Reagan administration’s push for decentralization—the “New Federalism,” which was characterized as harkening back to the days of rugged individualism—was that it simultaneously drove hard toward bolstering both ideological centralization and conformity. Diversity no longer had a home in the frontier myth of the Reagan years.[8]

REAGAN AS A SAGEBRUSH REBEL

For more than three decades, the Sagebrush Rebellion has been associated in popular memory with Ronald Reagan and his controversial secretary of the interior, James Watt. The “rebellion” pitted ranchers, loggers, miners, and others against Washington bureaucrats in a conflict over the West’s land, water, and natural resources. Here the two frontier ideals of the construction of a libertarian American individual and its creation of democratic equality for all Americans (with support of a federal government equalizer) appeared to come into direct opposition to one another. The biggest spark igniting the rebellion was the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which legislates that public land must be kept in perpetual trust by the government in Washington, DC. Western-federal relations soured further when the Carter administration brought in staffers from environmental groups to help shape key Interior Department policy decisions. Though somewhat disjointed, westerners of the late 1970s and early 1980s movement agreed on one thing: the region’s destiny was being dictated by outsiders who did not understand the West and were exploiting it and them. During the initial scuffles, angry Alaskan “Rebs” burned an aircraft belonging to the National Park Service; that same state’s voters also approved a proposal setting up a special statehood commission to “reconsider and recommend appropriate changes”—a kind of symbolic attempt to secede from the Union. Other western states passed legislation that laid claim to parts of the 700 million acres of land under federal control.

By 1979 a New York Times headline declared, “West Taking South’s Place as Most Alienated Area.”[9] Carter officials were baffled by the depth of resulting western antagonism since, from their own standpoint, they were simply asserting the broader national and western interests against more parochial western interests. A few months later, Washington outsider Ronald Reagan was going out of his way to identify himself as “a Sagebrush rebel” bent on crushing the alleged corruption and tyranny of the East while defending the pioneering values of the West. Campaigning in Idaho Falls in 1980, the Republican presidential candidate pledged, “The next administration won’t treat the West as if it were not worthy of attention. The next administration will reflect the values and goals of the Sagebrush Rebellion.”[10] The myth of the West as most representative of independent and “free” Americans (as opposed to those corrupt, meddling easterners) and Reagan’s vague pronouncements supporting the Rebs had emerged just in time for the 1980 presidential election campaign. But as Richard White has characterized it, the rebellion was “a very old play staged under a new title . . . yet another attempt to get the federal government to cede public lands to the states.” White pointed out that one of the great paradoxes of the West was its image of a land of rugged individualism while, in reality, it was also the region of the country (excluding the Pacific Coast) most dependent on the federal government.[11]

In the end, while the Sagebrush Rebellion had the support of a number of interest groups, it never had a carefully developed or consistent ideology that could explain why state ownership would make the West more well-off or better serve the nation’s interest in terms of fairness. Under the existing system, many ranchers, miners, and recreationists (the latter of whom had opposed state ownership from the outset) came to the realization that all had free access to federal lands under the existing system, which might end once placed under a state’s jurisdiction.[12] When he became president, Reagan’s secretary of the interior James Watt’s own thoughtless, pro-development statements helped further galvanize opposition from environmentalists and rebels alike and kill the remnants of the rebel support. And once the lines of controversy became clearer, the Reagan administration withdrew its initial support. This was one battle that “The Gipper” did not win; it also provides us with an early case of where the conservative myth’s power to persuade, while initially potent, had limits when contemporary realities and events did not fit comfortably within its parameters.[13]

RACE RELATIONS

Theodore Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s ideas about race relations on the frontier and in modern America evolved and acquired more depth over time, but this issue would always remain a blind spot for Ronald Reagan. Here political expediency and Reagan’s own adherence to the conservative brand of the myth appear to have been behind his myopia. During the 1960s Reagan usually avoided anything to do with the civil rights movement and the politics of racial justice. Reagan’s deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver later said that “‘Reagan never got beyond the Jackie Robinson story.’”[14] Lou Cannon concurred that while Reagan was no racist, he also “described racial prejudice like it was all in the past. . . . He never got to the next level on the issue.”[15] Cannon points out that throughout Reagan’s career there was never anyone trying politically to get him there since African Americans did not support him anyway. Perhaps as a result, so the argument runs, Reagan never openly advocated racist practices and did not condemn them either. For example, in 1964, when he delivered the biggest speech of his career up until that time, “A Time for Choosing”—at the very height of changes in civil rights—Reagan incredibly made no reference to these historic issues.[16] When pressed, Reagan would say that he opposed the civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration, arguing that such social change, even if desirable, should not be spearheaded by the national government. If one can judge from his actions and words (or lack of them), it appears that the questions of racial justice did not interest him as he gave little thought to what it meant to be a minority in America, the self-proclaimed land of the free. For Reagan, traditional individualism always trumped social engineering and state-sponsored inclusion.

Politically, during his presidential years, Reagan appears to have found it difficult to express his distaste for racism primarily because of the support that he sought and received from southern conservatives (both Republicans and “boll weevil” Democrats); as a result, African Americans are probably the minority group most unhappy with the Reagan White House years.

In addition to the pragmatic (or opportunistic) political incentives, though, part of Reagan’s disinterest and at times seeming indifference toward racial issues may also stem from the fact that he was largely unable to incorporate history into his own mythic understanding of America’s past. In his debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan responded as follows to a question about America’s future as a multiracial society: “I believe in it. I am eternally optimistic, and I’m happy to believe that we’ve made great progress from the days when I was young and when this country didn’t even know it had a race problem.” Carter then challenged his opponent’s confusion and ignorance by pointing out that minorities were well aware of a race problem in the early twentieth century. Carter suggested Reagan’s evasion of the question seemed to suggest that, for him, “this country” meant white America. The root of the trouble for Reagan was that he never came to terms with the serious inconsistencies in his mythic narratives about unity and coherence in the American western and national experience.[17] Reagan’s belief in and preaching of frontier optimism seemed to create blinders for Reagan in terms of the reality for those Americans—minorities and the poor—who lived on the margins or were excluded from the kind of society that the Reaganites envisioned. As with the mythic frontier of Reagan’s imagination, his vision was that of a mainstream, masculine America where the nation’s ethnic and racial variety, women, and the impoverished were missing. This same nostalgic drive to restore a vanished past had shifted the frontier myth from one of liberalism and inclusion to one of conservatism and exclusion.

One group of people whom Reagan did not want projected into the past to allow a history were Native Americans: the old “savage” enemy (replaced in the twentieth century by Communists) and obstructions to Turner’s “superior” American civilization. In 1988 when a university student in Moscow, USSR, asked Reagan to explain the disastrous economic and social conditions of the nation’s Native American population, the president responded, “We have provided millions of acres of land for what are called preservations—or reservations, I should say. They [American Indians], from the beginning, announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life, as they had always lived there in the desert and the plains and so forth.” Then the president mused, but “maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that, wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, no, come join us. Be citizens along with the rest of us.”[18]

Reagan’s talk of “humoring” Native Americans on “preservations” was revealing. It was Reagan, after all, who first vetoed major Indian health-care legislation, then cut the existing services by 13 percent. Even during the years of economic growth, his appointees reduced federal appropriations for housing, education, and legal aid to Native Americans with overall expenditures dropping 18 percent between 1982 and 1984 alone. The smiling president also appeared unaware of the fact that Native Americans had been US citizens since 1924.[19]

Reagan’s ignorance of the past, frontier imaginings, and more broadly his anti-intellectual streak on a wide range of issues extending beyond race relations were the subjects of numerous editorial cartoonists. During the 1980s, dozens of political cartoons portrayed Reagan as clueless, but interestingly, a majority of the public—minorities and liberals being two notable exceptions—did not seem to care; they liked him anyway. Early depictions of the Reagan Library feature books opened to empty pages and another showing Reagan himself at the presidential library’s reference desk with just his own memoirs and a Zane Grey novel in the spacious and otherwise empty shelves behind him.[20] A 1988 Bruce Beattie cartoon portrays a befuddled but still mounted cowboy Reagan riding off into the sunset in the wrong direction (“Uh, Ron, the sunset you’re supposed to ride off into is THAT way . . .”).[21]

But though Reagan may have been short on smarts, he is still typically envisioned as tall in the saddle. For most commanders in chief, Reagan’s perceived “reality gap” would have caused serious harm, but as former Johnson aide–turned-journalist Bill Moyers wryly observed, “We didn’t elect this guy because he knows how many barrels of oil there are in Alaska. We elected him because he makes us feel good.”[22]

BONANZA ECONOMICS, TAXES, AND DEFICITS

The conservative revision of the frontier myth also provided fuel for the Republican president’s references to “bonanza economics”—not through the tapping of abundant resources on a new physical frontier but rather through the magic of supply-side Reaganomics combined with the call for a revival of the nation’s spirit. Reagan’s campaign praised the bonanzas of previous “boom” eras, and now it was his intention to revive a cowboy economy in a postindustrial age. The Reaganites hoped to use the manipulation of capital as a replacement for agricultural and industrial production to drive the nation’s economic recovery. Through deregulation and tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, Reagan claimed that a “bonanza” of new capital would guarantee a constant and painless economic growth—that “with a rising tide” all boats would float (just as the frontier myth alleged that even “the little guy” benefited from wealth creation).[23] This, the supply-side president explained, would work in the same way that opening up “vast . . . untapped wealth” out west—including agricultural lands, oil, and gold—had driven the economy in the past.[24] As Reagan phrased it, when signing the 1982 St. Germain-Garn bill that deregulated the savings and loan industry, “All in all, I think we’ve hit the jackpot.”[25] Reagan offered further reassurances in his second inaugural address in 1985. Once again, as in their glorious past, Americans were told that they were living in a world without limits: “We believed then and now: There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.”[26] Here Reagan delivered the optimistic old frontier bonanza idea all over again, which was received to cheering ovations as he, like Turner, gave expression to the intense wishes of the nation. The frontier myth of the Reagan years inspired deregulation in banking and industry in a big way: a change that would come back to haunt Reagan’s successor George H. W. Bush a few years down the road.

In the popular mind, Americans had conquered the untamed West, and with the same adventurous spirit Reaganites believed they would emerge triumphant in the face of contemporary challenges as well. As Reagan closed his second inaugural speech, facing westward from the Capitol for the first time in history (in a deliberate symbolic gesture), he told Americans that “at the steps of this symbol of democracy . . . we see and hear again the echoes of our past: the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. We sing it still. . . . We are together as of old.”[27] Reagan thus tied together the past, present, and future as he called upon Americans to dedicate themselves to living out this story. For the president, the attributes of the past could help Americans triumph economically, socially, and politically over their challenges in the present. Reagan’s nostalgia promoted a comfortable, mythic referent to a place and time that no longer existed—if it ever had. And unlike Lyndon Johnson and in many respects TR, who viewed history with a sense of continuity and progression, Reagan’s backward thinking of the frontier West “as it ought to have been” discouraged this continuity.

Tax cuts were the most touted feature of the Reaganomics program. During the hyperinflation of the 1970s, millions of Americans saw their incomes rise but their purchasing power stay the same; meanwhile, their taxes kept increasing. But by 1980, in response to angry constituents, dozens of states began slashing property and state income taxes. Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act—signed at a heavily hyped event for the press at Rancho del Cielo—offered a broad array of tax concessions, including a phased in 23 percent cut in individual tax rates over three years and a lowering of the maximum income tax rate from 70 to 50 percent for 1982. Before long, however, Reagan discovered that there was not enough waste and fraud to make the substantial budget cuts that he had promised so easily during the campaign.[28] Tax cuts were followed with tax increases, which the president slickly referred to as “revenue enhancers,”[29] and his frequently repeated promise to shrink government did not occur. The tripling of the national debt from 1980 to 1989 was primarily the result of Reagan keeping his word on national defense as he demanded and received congressional approval for more than $2 trillion in defense spending.[30]

In 1983, even when unemployment reached more than 10 percent and the economy looked as if it were about to plunge over a cliff, Reagan insisted that the country stay the course. “Our government is too big and it spends too much,”[31] he would continue to say as if defense expenditures did not count. Then in late 1983 and 1984, a dramatic economic recovery arrived as inflation plunged from 11 percent down to 2 percent, unemployment dropped to 7.5 percent, and annual growth accelerated to 7.2 percent[32]—enabling a president who once appeared to be in “phaseout” mode to win with the largest popular majority of the vote since LBJ in 1964. “The sour economy is the fault of Jimmy Carter,” Reagan said repeatedly;[33] by employing these phrases consistently over time he effectively etched blame on the Democrats in the public mind and had set himself up for the credit when things turned around. Reagan was able to pursue his feel-good Morning in America campaign in 1984—projecting a return to glory years past—and winning a landslide reelection victory in the process. By the end of his administration, Reagan had in reality expanded the federal payroll and created a huge debt that would trip up his successor George H. W. Bush. But none of this mattered at the time: the perception of much of the American public was that Reagan was promoting greater individualism, independence, and self-reliance through tax cuts and alleged reductions in federal spending, which served to tie his image even more closely to the neoconservative frontiers of the 1980s.

President Reagan and a Buffalo Bill Cody lookalike link the Republicans’ promotion of conservative budget reform with the frontier myth. (Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library, White House Photograph Collection, North Platte, Nebraska, August 13, 1987, Roll C42192, Frame 6)

Reagan’s constant talk of less government, reduced spending, and less intrusion was also a case of perception over reality in relation to a favorite old theme of Ronald Reagan’s, law and order, which was spun with much effectiveness by his handlers in 1980 and throughout his presidency. After “Sheriff” Reagan took office and started appointing conservative judges who emphasized punishment over rehabilitation, the length of prison sentences increased substantially. In part as a result of these initiatives against domestic outlaws, the number of prisoners in the US prison system has risen dramatically ever since, from five hundred thousand in 1980 to 1.5 million in 1994[34] to 2.3 million by 2014—the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world.[35] “We put criminals on notice,” Reagan told Americans. “We said: make one false move, and the next sound you hear is the clang of a jail cell door slamming shut.”[36] In the words of Dirty Harry, the president often liked to use speeches to tell criminals, “You’re out of luck.”[37] Another ironic twist of the frontier vision of the 1980s, however, is that in combining the rugged individualism theme that Reagan accepted as a key defining characteristic of the nation with his unwavering insistence on stability and order, Reagan stirred up a strange brew that could only be realized through the costly expansion of the US federal prison system. Defense spending and issues such as incarceration served to send the nation’s debt through the roof.

Many conservatives tipped their hats to bureaucrat-bashing Ronnie Reagan, their western frontier hero. But the former B-movie actor’s opponents used the cowboy-frontier image frequently as well, attacking Reagan’s “cowboy capitalism” for cutting taxes; firing air traffic controllers and deregulation in the areas of air traffic control, banking, and the environment; cutting public assistance programs and Head Start; dramatically increasing military spending; expanding the prison system; and pushing budget proposals that appeared regionally biased in favor of the West.

Reagan had long characterized “tax-and-spend” Democrats as outlaws who had looted America of its wealth and vitality. In the context of the 1980s, many Americans had come to accept this explanation. But, in the end, opponents charged that his wild “borrow-and-spend” Republican bunch with its gigantic military buildup would create the largest peacetime deficits in history and a huge national debt that would take generations of Americans to pay off.[38] The legacy of Reagan’s decision to deregulate also received a rough ride, especially in the years directly following his final term in office. While in the short run deregulation may have worked to promote economic growth in some areas of the US economy, these gains were likely more than offset by the savings and loan bailout of 1989–95. Research has shown that the US savings and loan crisis, a direct result of the Reagan administration’s deregulation campaign, created what one observer described as “the single greatest regulatory lapse of this century”—causing the federal government to spend $250 billion to cover losses, an amount approaching the total cost of the Vietnam War.[39]

As Professor Michael Mandelbaum described him in the journal Foreign Affairs, Reagan was viewed by opponents as “ill equipped for the responsibility that he bears, a kind of cowboy figure, bellicose, ignorant, with a simplistic view of the world pieced together from the journals of right-wing opinion and old Hollywood movies.”[40] For Reagan and his supporters, the president’s connection with the frontier myth and the cowboy was a political statement and a powerful symbol that could be used to disarm his detractors by suggesting, if not stating directly, that opposition to Reaganism was somehow less “American.” For liberals on the other hand—and in a sad turn for proponents of a liberal take on the frontier myth—Reagan’s close association with black-hat villains (as opposed to heroes), conservative ideology, and the frontier would further weaken their own positive associations with the frontier myth, and cause them to turn increasingly away from and even against the myth and symbolism of the frontier as a way of representing their own liberal causes. We return to that point in the next chapter regarding George W. Bush.

REAGAN ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

During the 1980 campaign, many Europeans and some Americans as well expressed fears that a “nuclear cowboy” Ronald Reagan would make at least as trigger happy a commander in chief of America’s nuclear arsenal as Barry Goldwater would have. In London, in an updated version of political satirist Tom Lehrer’s 1965 classic recording “Who’s Next?,” Lehrer nervously asserted, “We’ll try to stay serene and calm / When Ronald Reagan gets the Bomb.” Cartoons in France, meanwhile, depicted “Ronnie le Cowboy” as Major Kong from the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, cheerfully riding a nuke while wildly waving his Stetson.[41]

Reagan’s handlers responded. In a confidential memo from 1980 campaign strategist Richard Wirthlin to Reagan, Bush, and their senior campaign directors, a strategy was proposed in response to Reagan’s portrayal as “too quick to push the nuclear button.” Wirthlin hoped that his approach would at least allay the fears of the American voter (the memory of the Goldwater disaster in 1964 explains the urgency here). Wirthlin’s recommendations were followed to the letter.[42] In his two TV ads on the topic of “Peace,” Reagan put on the hat of the responsible cowboy, reminiscent of LBJ in 1964, but also reminded Americans that “history has taught us only too well that tyrants are tempted only when the forces of freedom are weak, not when they are strong”; uses the exact “gentle” phrasing found in his strategist’s memo (replacing common Reagan-Bush phrases such as “defense posture” with “peace posture”); and concludes the lengthier of the two spots with, “Peace is our dream . . . and I pledge to you that, as your president, of all the objectives we seek, first and foremost will be the establishment of world peace.”[43] While preserving Reagan’s hawkish tough-on-tyrants image, his team was clearly determined not to make the same miscalculations that the Goldwaterites had sixteen years earlier.

Throughout his two terms in the White House, Reagan offered a “peace through strength” philosophy and massive military buildup reminiscent of TR’s big-stick approach for which a majority of Americans of the 1980s era apparently longed. As the archenemy of communism and champion of American supremacy, Reagan used words and symbolism that “evoked a powerful belief that the past that never was could not only be restored but would secure America’s role as ‘number one’ in the world.”[44] The powerful idea of American exceptionalism, superiority as a civilization, and unlimited potential was alive and well in the Reagan years—only this time it was big business and not the federal government that promised to fulfill the nation’s frontier destinies.

In 1983 Reagan sent the American military in like the gun-toting heroes of The Magnificent Seven to liberate Grenada—the smallest independent country in the western hemisphere—on the justification of rooting out communist Cubans holed up in government offices and schools. According to White House sources, the Marines aided defenseless settlers against “a brutal gang of thugs.”[45] Reagan told Americans that the tiny island nation “was a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.”[46] While a secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report later concluded that Reagan’s assessment was grossly inaccurate and that little may have been accomplished in real terms, the Americans were at long last victorious again. The shame of the Vietnam debacle could be erased, Reaganites seem to have believed, through their own president’s “splendid little war.”[47] Grenada, though tiny, was a frontier that was conquered quickly and decisively, thereby feeding Reagan’s message of reassurance and bringing back the frontier mythic America that regarded itself as a nation of winners.

SOVIET OUTLAWS

Cowboy Reagan faced several non-Communist “troublemakers” during his White House years, including that “mad dog of the Middle East” Libya’s Colonel Muammar Khadafi, but no enemy was nearly as lethal or troubling to Reagan or most other Americans as the Soviet Union. Strongly influenced by his own frontier vision, including his belief in the necessity of individual liberty in a free society, Reagan not only railed about Soviet power but abhorred what he envisioned as the entire cradle-to-grave Soviet way of life. Holding on to his frontier visions of an earlier age, the president repeatedly counterpoised his idealized images of an older America—with its alleged simple truths of individualism, self-reliance, know-how, and higher values—against the negative images of modern life in Soviet Russia. In fact, up until the thaw with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-to late 1980s, virtually all of the public descriptions that Reagan offered of the Soviets were negative and nasty. According to Robert Ivie, “The Soviet Union is depicted [by Reagan] as a ‘Natural Menace,’ as animals, primitives, machines, criminals, mentally disturbed, as fanatics and ideologues, and as satanic and profane.”[48] Globally, the Soviets’ skullduggery and America’s own weakness due to Carter’s administration was said to be responsible for every unfortunate turn of events—from Grenada to the attack on the Beirut Marine barracks in Lebanon, and in particular the Korean Airlines massacre. Dating back to the 1960s, Reagan had never equated “grim” liberals[49] with Communists, but his depiction of an increasingly government-controlled nation would supposedly leave the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union so marginal that foolish appeasement and accommodation with the Reds would be the only course.

As the champion of conservative frontier values and the enemy of communism—and its postwar association with enormous concentrations of state power—the white-hatted Reagan (initially) hated the idea of détente with the duplicitous, black-hatted Soviets. “Detente,” he would say, “isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey, until Thanksgiving Day?”[50] Reagan did not trust the Soviets, thought that his predecessor presidents had enabled Red power and global reach to increase, and was determined to counter it with a massive military buildup and a war of words. In his often-quoted speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, Reagan warned of the Soviet enemy: “Let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” Reagan continued, “I urge you to beware the temptation . . . to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of any evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”[51]

During his first few years in office, Reagan pulled no punches—listing alleged Soviet crimes against humanity at every opportunity.[52] The era of gentler diplomacy was over, and a period of intense anti-Communist rhetoric, military buildups, and “freedom fighter” activities in the third world was in as gunfighter Reagan and his followers hoped that one day, as in the Hollywood world of the Old West, Brezhnev and his gang would get the drubbing they deserved.

In April 1981 two Harvard Business School students, John G. Freund and David M. Porter, created Bedtime for Brezhnev, helping to transform Reagan’s alleged cowboy credentials from a humorous popular culture concoction of B-westerns and a chimp comedy into a persona that perfectly matched the renewed and revised version of the American frontier myth. The poster created something of a sensation, selling 275,000 copies, and its creators won Harvard’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” prize. Freund wrote that articles about the poster and its creators ran “in hundreds of newspapers and print media,” Good Morning America appearances followed, and Porter heard through a friend that the president loved B for B. Upon his sudden departure in 1982, Secretary of State Alexander Haig received a copy of Bedtime for Brezhnev at his retirement party.[53]

Bedtime for Brezhnev (Poster, 18 × 27 in. Created by and reprinted with permission of John G. Freund and David M. Porter)

Reagan metaphorically confronted the evil Reds in a 1984 reelection campaign TV ad portraying the Soviet threat as “a bear in the woods”: a piece that members of the Boone and Crockett Club might have admired. Here a grizzly bear is seen moving, slowly and ominously, through the underbrush and across a stream. A friendly voiceover favoring Reagan’s candidacy asks, “There’s a bear in the woods. . . . Isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?” At the end of the ad, a faceless, rifle-toting hunter in the same woods stands tall on a hill as the bear approaches; the beast stops, hesitates, and timidly steps backward. The fantasy imagery is clear: Ronald Reagan is the armed and ready guardian gunslinger or pioneer who, on the international frontier, will confront the Soviet bear and keep the American nation safe.[54]

A SILVER BULLET

Ronald Reagan’s wholehearted acceptance of a particular expression of the frontier myth and his calls for a restoration of the simple truths of the past also informed national policies such as the highly ambitious and expensive Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” program. Proposed just two weeks after the president delivered his famous 1982 “Evil Empire” speech about the Soviet Union, the project would fulfill his image requirement that a single hero, or in this case a hero nation, would save the day by raising a “space shield” that enemy missiles could not penetrate. Here the Reagan administration shifted the frontier scene from finite land to infinite space. As Garry Wills points out in Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, to Reagan and a large segment of the American public, SDI was “much like the Lone Ranger’s silver bullet which he used only to knock guns out of the bad guy’s hands.”[55] And unlike Jimmy Carter, who had allegedly allowed American frontiers to diminish and shrank the sphere of American influence by ceding the Panama Canal without even unbuckling his holster, Reagan’s Star Wars program (like JFK’s and LBJ’s Apollo missions) promised the nation that a “New Frontier” was out there for Americans to master—in space. The president saw the possibility of using a scientific future to return America to its Edenic past: a time before nuclear weapons threatened the existence of the planet.

Thus, the Reagan vision was once again restorative. In his SDI speech, his challenge to science even contained a kind of sacred element: “I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us a means of rendering these weapons impotent and obsolete.”[56] Scientists were, in effect, being given a chance to atone for their original sin by conquering a new challenge. As the New Republic put it, “In classic Reagan style, he offered a simple, clear, and hopeful vision: a shining city on a hill—with a moat.”[57] In doing so, Reagan was also marshaling support for the project through the same kind of can-do optimism that was part and parcel of the frontier myth.[58]

Just as Turner had described the American frontier as a “safety valve” for the exhaustion and pollution of the Old World in the East, now unexplored spaces in the universe needed to be found for Americans to maintain their unique identity as a nation of pioneers. The idea of a mystique and lure of unknown frontiers and myth of an exceptional American pioneering spirit was laid on thick in an advertisement sponsored by the Coalition for the Strategic Defense Initiative that appeared in USA Today. The commercial was formatted as a giant thank-you letter addressed to “Mr. President” and stated, among other things,

You have unleashed a surge of technological advance in the U.S. and in the rest of the Free World which will not only solve the problems of strategic defense, but will also open up space to tap its unlimited resources and energy and its unique manufacturing environment for the good of mankind.

You have made it possible that in the year 1992, 500 years after Columbus opened up the frontiers of the New World, the U.S. and its Free World allies will open up the high frontier of space for our security and our prosperity as spacefaring nations. Free enterprise investment in space systems demands long-term security be provided, and SDI is an essential first step in that direction.

Get our children out from under the nuclear Sword of Damocles. Free men for centuries will never forget your role in delivering them from the nuclear balance of terror.[59]

Here we see Reaganites’ rhetorical removal of what had been a technological horror, or the “the nuclear Sword of Damocles,” so that Americans might once again take up their frontiering odyssey for centuries to come. It is essentially an expansion of the revised frontier-myth structure replete, though not stated explicitly here, with bad guys (or more specifically, the weapons of the non-“free” powers) for the heroic and exceptional frontier nation to subdue and destroy. Reagan’s solution, once again, implies a return to the good old days, only this time it was through an ideal projected future based on the lessons and values of the past.

Both Reagan and Lyndon Johnson had employed frontier symbolism in their equating of leadership in space with security interests. But while Johnson had emphasized this outer-space extension of the frontiers of freedom as one that would facilitate adoption and change—enabling American society to become freer, fairer, more inclusive, and more democratic—Reagan’s supporters characteristically linked the proposed SDI adventure with “free enterprise investment” that could tap into the cosmos’ “unlimited resources and energy and unique manufacturing environment.”[60] The final frontier had taken a hard turn to the right since the days of JFK and LBJ and was now being viewed less as a venture in change and growth politically and socially, and more as a cause for investment optimism.

Not everyone was excited about the plans for the Star Wars project. Critics charged that the $26-billion-plus project was unfeasible (it never did make it out of the research stages) and that the Soviets would have the last laugh when America went broke trying to build the elaborate contraption. Reagan’s frontier connections and heroic cowboy persona, however, appeared to offer further grist in support of SDI. A 1986 cartoon portrayal of the president by Jerry Robinson depicts the Star Wars initiative as a constellation in the shape of Reagan as a cowboy with his cocked pistol drawn—the frontier sheriff facing down the villains. Two Russian astronomers with a huge telescope look tiny compared to the gun-toting and fearless Reagan. One of the Soviet scientists says to the other, “I Think We Better Call Comrade Gorbachev.” This six-gun Reagan has compelled the Reds to understand that they no longer face a wobbly legged adversary. Even in cartoon form, we observe that Reagan the space-gunfighter is self-reliant, aggressive, and a true believer in Manifest Destiny. Robinson’s work is a kind of comical fulfillment of one of the Reagan campaign’s feature rallying cries: “America is back!”[61]

Constellation cowboy Reagan gets the drop on the Soviets with the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka the Star Wars program. (Cartoon by Jerry Robinson, 1986; CartoonArts International [CWS])

THE REASONABLE COWBOY CONSERVATIVE

A number of events appear to have come together in the late summer and early fall of 1983 that forced Ronald Reagan to rethink and reshape his own ideas about the frontier myth, specifically in the context of America’s Cold War confrontation with the USSR. The shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 by the Soviets on September 1, 1983, was the first of these, and as historian Beth Fisher has asserted,[62] the incident hit home to Reagan the possibility that human error could bring about nuclear annihilation. Reagan later wrote in his memoirs that “If mistakes could be made by a fighter pilot, what about a similar miscalculation by the commander of a missile launch crew?”[63] Reagan became even more deeply affected after watching the ABC made-for-TV movie The Day After in October. The story, depicting what would happen if there were a nuclear attack on Kansas City, Missouri, stunned Reagan—he wrote in his diary, “It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. . . . My own reaction was . . . to see there is never a nuclear war.”[64] The movie had demonstrated to Reagan (through the medium that appears to have most influenced him)[65] that nuclear war could never be won by either side. And it had done so in a visual story about ordinary Americans, which, like the tales of the frontier myth, was “especially well-suited to Reagan’s intellect.”[66] At what Reagan described as a “sobering” Pentagon briefing just days after viewing The Day After, he was told that nuclear war was winnable. “I thought they were crazy,” the president wrote. “Worse, it appeared there were also Soviet generals who thought in terms of winning a nuclear war.”[67] With scenes of nuclear annihilation fresh in his mind, Reagan likened the Pentagon briefing to the movie The Day After.[68] Adding further to Reagan’s anxieties, in November he learned that the Soviets had become unglued during a NATO war game, thinking it was a real attack, and had seriously considered ordering a preemptive nuclear strike on the United States.[69] Reagan expressed his shock that Soviet leaders genuinely feared an American nuclear attack and pondered whether his own rhetoric might have contributed to this dangerous perception.[70]

The Day After movie, and all of the surrounding events of this period, were pivotal in Reagan’s life and political career and apparently caused him to reassess his policy approach to the Soviets. With the threat of nuclear annihilation now at or near the top of his agenda, the former “nuclear cowboy” (who, as governor, once boasted that an atomized North Vietnam could be paved over as a parking lot)[71] now became an advocate not only of reductions but of the elimination of nuclear weapons. Reagan wrote seven years after these events, “As long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used, and once the first weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end? My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons.”[72] Though he wrote these words in hindsight, his actions at the time are also demonstrative of a shift away from his adherence to a gunslinger stance against the USSR toward a reasonable and more conciliatory “trust but verify” cowboy. A reoriented cowboy Reagan would attempt to make peace with his enemies for the common good rather than the hardliner, hawkish approach of attempting to stare them down on a dusty, deserted street. Indeed, for Reagan, the postwar doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) was now identified with “madness.” In terms that adherents to the frontier myth could well understand, Reagan likened MAD to “two westerners standing in a saloon aiming their guns at each other’s head—permanently.”[73] Reagan, then, was rethinking and to some degree redesigning the structures of the frontier myth. And he was not alone. Stanley Feldman and Lee Sigelman’s research has demonstrated that after watching The Day After, the issue of nuclear war came much more to the forefront in the minds of millions of other Americans as well who sought additional information on the issue from the print media in particular. Feldman and Sigelman also found, “The more news stories about nuclear war one watched or read, the more likely one was to move toward a more conciliatory approach to U.S.-Soviet relations. This is a powerful effect.”[74] Events, the popular media, and two powerful world leaders would collectively cause precisely the kind of shifts in the frontier myth’s Cold War mentality that Marshall Sahlins challenges us to look for.

A shift in Reagan’s public tone toward the Soviets was noticeable and would intensify with time. At a press conference prior to his September 1984 meeting with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, Reagan was asked, “Do you think this meeting will help people come to your way of thinking: that you’re not the trigger-happy cowboy you say people like to portray you as?” The president responded, “Well, the most important thing is what understanding I can reach with Foreign Minister Gromyko to maybe convince him that the United States means no harm.”[75] But the real change came after Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the USSR. In 1987 Premier Gorbachev told Reagan he was willing to make a deal on a medium-range missile treaty, and to the horror of many of his conservative advisers (but encouraged by his wife, Nancy, and Secretary of State George Shultz), Reagan reached back.[76] In Washington on December 9, 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces. It was an epochal event that led to the eventual end of the arms race altogether. Hard-line conservative hawks were convinced, however, that their president had been royally duped and that only the fall of the USSR could genuinely turn things around.[77] But Reagan could no longer abide by the “showdown” mentality; instead he took on the persona of the tough but reasonable cowboy whose foreign policy now placed the prevention of a catastrophic war at or near the top of the agenda.

Toward the end of Reagan’s time in office, in January 1988, the Washington Post pondered, “What a strange nuclear place Ronald Reagan has brought himself and the rest of us to” as “the mad bomber of the West” of just a few years before had been replaced with a president who accepted nuclear disarmament as a worthy goal. In an editorial reminiscent of those defending “that crazy cowboy” Theodore Roosevelt a few years after he too had entered the office, Stephen J. Rosenfeld conceded that Reagan “did not do crazy things after all” and was “never as monstrous as people said.” Rosenfeld’s column was aptly titled “Myth of the Nuclear Cowboy.”[78] Today, at the Reagan Ranch Center Museum in Santa Barbara, the image of Reagan as a warmonger continues to be combated with a display of the Reagans’ highly publicized ranch-invite to former Soviet premier Gorbachev, who arrived in Santa Barbara on a private jet named Capitalist Tool and then unwittingly wore his ten-gallon cowboy hat backward during his entire visit.[79]

CONSTRAINTS OF THE CONSERVATIVE FRONTIER MYTH

Ronald Reagan’s initial deployment of the frontier myth and pre-1984 shoot-from-the-hip storytelling had not been without awkward moments and major setbacks for his administration. During his first term, Reagan’s good-versus-evil “showdown” mentality between an American West and a Soviet East caused some serious difficulties for his associates. Reagan’s strongest ally in the Senate, Paul Laxalt of Nevada, told an interviewer in 2001 that for a time it was his responsibility to meet, on behalf of Reagan, with the Soviet ambassador. He got to know the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, well and seemed to be building a more trustful relationship. “That all went fine until Reagan called the Soviets an evil empire,” said Laxalt. “I could have just died, because that just reinforced the Kremlin view that he was just a wild-assed cowboy.”[80]

But it was the Iran-Contra scandal of 1985 to 1987, in which arms were secretly sold to Iran as part of an operation to gain the release of Americans being held hostage in Lebanon (and so that proceeds could be used to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua), that became the most damaging of Reagan’s mistakes while in office and stemmed directly from the president’s own desire to project himself as a tough and respected leader who exemplified the manly values of the frontier myth. The deal was viewed by most Americans—including some of Reagan’s most senior cabinet members—as clearly inconsistent with the policy of standing up to terrorism. Iran, after all, was considered one of America’s enemies, and the public vividly remembered the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran. Personal notes from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger describe conversations with Reagan where the president was determined to trade arms for hostages. Weinberger recorded, “President sd. he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn’t answer charges that ‘big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages.’”[81] Weinberger’s notes, taken on the day of the conversations, record that he and Secretary of State George Shultz vehemently objected to the president’s position and, along with White House chief of staff Don Regan, attempted unsuccessfully to sway Reagan away from his course. Later, an independent investigation reached the conclusion that the arms sales to Iran “were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan [and] Vice President George Bush,” and also that “large volumes of highly relevant, contemporaneously created documents were systematically and willfully withheld from investigators by several Reagan Administration officials.”[82] Though eleven of fourteen officials charged were convicted of criminal charges, many were later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush. Cowboy Reagan’s flawed policy arguably stemmed from his understanding of the demands of the frontier-hero fascination with films like the Rambo and Missing in Action series (featuring their “captivity formula,” which, Richard Slotkin contended, “links them to the most basic story-form of the Frontier myth”[83]), determination to avoid the kind of recent humiliation experienced by Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, and his apparent obsession with freeing the Beirut hostages. Together these factors persuaded Reagan and some of his underlings to pursue a series of illegal covert actions that tainted the second term of his presidency.

“Irangate” is the event that most challenged the structures of frontier philosophy that Reagan had developed. The structures, as Sahlins explained, simply could not sustain themselves in the face of the events surrounding the controversy. The images of the frontier that Reagan had cultivated required him to project a tough, masculine persona, and these in turn contributed to serious policy inconsistencies that backfired on the president, likewise demonstrated a disregard for the democratic system, and exposed Reagan’s disconnect from the American people. More broadly, Reagan’s adherence to the conservative incarnation of the frontier myth and American exceptionalism not only narrowed his field of judgment but promoted an exclusively American view on international problems.

A misguided president drops by at his own “Alamo” in Beirut, Lebanon, where 241 American military personnel were killed when truck bombs exploded at their highly vulnerable barracks. (Cartoon by Bob Gorrell, Richmond [VA] News Leader, 1983, and is reprinted here by permission of Bob Gorrell and Creators Syndicate, Inc.)

This same mind-set may have also led to Reagan’s earlier failures in Lebanon. According to biographer Lou Cannon, Reagan ignored the advice of his secretary of defense and military advisers in 1983 who strongly urged that US forces stationed in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war be pulled out of that city due to their serious vulnerability. On October 23, 1983, hundreds of Marines died when a suicide bomber detonated his vehicle after crashing into their four-story barracks.[84]

Such tragic turns of events as the Beirut bombing and credibility gaps as Iran-Contra may have destroyed most of Reagan’s predecessors. However, the “Teflon president’s” personal popularity helped him to survive these major setbacks in the long run. In sharp contrast to Jimmy Carter and 1984 Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale, Reagan continually projected themes of limitless frontiers and optimism, which paid off at the polls.[85]

Reagan’s perception of the frontier past, with its broad nationalist themes, was shaped heavily by his own conservative philosophy and its application to contemporary political issues. As was the case with his ideological opponent Lyndon Johnson, this connection came at the expense of integrity, with the complexity of history having been replaced with a narrative of overall American destiny. But as noted earlier, while the disconnect of myth and metaphor with reality eventually destroyed Johnson, Reagan’s reputation, though tarnished, weathered these blows. For Reagan, it appeared that “the buck never stopped because the blame never stuck.”[86] Many middle-class Americans, it seems, wanted to believe in Reagan and the revised frontier values that were accepted as a given. He came, for many, to represent—including optimism—manliness (as opposed to the softer, more feminine Carter), individualism (freedom from government controls), self-reliance, resilience (as demonstrated after being shot early in his presidency), confidence (in his own economic theories and in Americans’ ability to conquer all challenges), calmness of purpose, and a spirit of adventure (SDI) that looked to restore the traditional past and accept its lessons as the nation’s polestar for the future.

REAGAN’S MIXED LEGACY

President Reagan painted a portrait of America that was not unlike those created by the artists Frederic Remington and Norman Rockwell, one of the good old days much of which never existed except in people’s happy memories. His Morning in America ad preached small government, insisting that “government does not solve problems . . . instead, it subsidizes them.”[87] In terms of actual results, however, the size of the federal government grew under Reagan’s presidency due primarily to a massive increase in military spending. Reagan is portrayed as a champion of the tax cutters, but he also raised taxes. His support base was made up of social conservatives, but Ron and Nancy rarely attended church.[88] Meanwhile, his cuts to social programs such as Medicare and aid to the poor, cuts to school lunch programs (including an unsuccessful attempt to redefine ketchup and relish as vegetables), antiunion tactics (most notably, the firing of thirteen thousand federal air traffic controllers), avoidance of civil rights issues, near complete lack of support for conservation concerns, the Irangate controversy, along with tax cuts for the wealthy left many liberal, minority, and underclass Americans bitter.[89]

In 2004 the chair of the NAACP, Julian Bond, told the Washington Post, “For many Americans, this was a time best forgotten. . . . [Reagan] was a polarizing figure in black America. He was hostile to the generally accepted remedies for discrimination. His appointments were of people as equally hostile. I can’t think of any Reagan policy that African Americans would embrace.”[90] Women’s rights groups, the growing number of urban homeless people, and AIDS victims also received little support or comfort from the president and his rightist programs. In the frontier version of America that Reagan bought into and perpetuated (both consciously and unconsciously), only conservative-leaning cowboys seemed welcome. Today it would be difficult to challenge the argument that Reagan’s own heavy emphasis on the individualism strains of the myth over its calls for community and inclusiveness has contributed to a long-term, increasing inequality in American society and a polarization of American politics.

Yet despite these substantive problems, Reagan to a greater degree than any other president, apart from TR, appears to have benefited in the long run from his deployment of (a particular conservative brand of) the frontier myth. So quickly had the structures of this myth shifted in the wake of LBJ’s term in office, and so effectively were they deployed by Reagan, he could use the myth to reshape the national political agenda. Conservatives and many centrists saw his greatest successes in renewing the public’s sense of optimism, lowering inflation, improving the standard of living for middle-class Americans (a point contested by many nonconservatives ever since), and negotiating an arms treaty that helped hasten dramatic political change in Eastern Europe. Even his 1981 tax cuts were for more than just the wealthy as the president insisted on initiating these across the board against the advice of his zealous budget-slasher David Stockman.[91] For a large segment of the American population growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Gerald Ford was perceived as a placeholder, Jimmy Carter as a failure, and Ronald Reagan as a frontier hero—someone bigger than the presidency who, unlike Carter, did not let the office beat him down.[92]

Ronald Reagan was the first of the radical conservatives—brandishing a revised frontier myth that emphasized individualism, liberty, reduction in the size of government, and vast expansion of the military—to reach the presidency. The archetypal fantasy figure, a cowboy with a cause, Reagan left office with an impressive rating of 63 percent approval and 29 percent disapproval.[93] Even many Americans who did not agree with his policies admired him as a person, and his direct connections with the post-1970s expression of the conservative frontier myth, perhaps more than any other factor, has forged a popular notion today that cowboy presidents and politicians are tied to Republicans and conservative ideals. As he prepared to ride off into the sunset in 1988 Reagan told his cowhands at the Republican National Convention, “We lit a prairie fire a few years back. . . . But we can never let the fire go out. . . . There’s still a lot of brush to clear out at the ranch, fences that need repair and horses to ride.”[94] Reagan continued to claim that, as in western novels and movies, the solutions to America’s problems were hard to achieve, but simple. Quoting from John Wayne’s character in The Alamo, Reagan claimed, “There’s right and wrong. You gotta do one or the other.”[95] At the end of Reagan’s second term, for the first time since poll-taking had begun in the United States, more Americans self-identified as conservatives than as liberals.[96] Benefiting from the events prior to and during much of his time in office, Reagan’s persona and policies not only fit the requirements of the conservative frontier myth but reinforced and popularized it.[97] Concurrently, this shift in frontier and western symbolism caused more Americans to self-identify with the right than the left—a perception that continued into the early twenty-first century.

Through the deployment of conservative expressions of the frontier myth, Reagan built a conservative counterestablishment in Washington, DC, that had been originally established to balance out liberals but over time became an establishment in its own right. The political successes of the Reagan administration were a direct benefactor of the resurgence and transformation of ideological structures of the frontier myth. The widely held perceptions of events from 1965 to 1979 worked to break up the consensus of a progressive, liberal frontier myth and ultimately resulted in a new conservative cowboy consensus built on a combination of nostalgia for the past, a renewed sense of “frontier” optimism and national exceptionalism, and in some respects, resentment. Along with the broader crises and realities of the late 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s own lack of popularity upon leaving Washington, his association with “not winning” in Vietnam, and a faltering economy also set the stage for shifting the dominant western structure and ownership of the frontier myth from the Democrats to the Republicans. The liberal frontier myth no longer matched historic experience (Sahlins), and the structure was transformed—veering hard right.

In some respects, Texas provides a kind of microcosm for understanding how historic events and personalities have brought dramatic reversals in the myth’s emphases. The change there from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican one was so marked from LBJ’s presidency through Reagan’s that the latter president could joke to a crowd at a rodeo in Mesquite in 1988, “It’s hard to believe that once upon a time to be a Republican around here felt a little like being Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon’—outnumbered in a big way.”[98] By the late 1980s, those days were over. Now Reagan was even invoking symbolism that had previously been part and parcel of LBJ’s repertoire: “I keep a special place in my heart for Texas—for every cowpoke or wildcatter, astronaut or rancher, and every man, woman and child who remembers the Alamo and knows the story of the battle of San Jacinto.”[99]

Myths will always be with the world, and Americans’ frontier myth structure from the late 1960s through the 1980s was revised to adjust its core features to changing perceptions of reality, some of which were large international events (the Vietnam War) while others were smaller and personal (including Reagan’s viewing of the made-for-TV movie The Day After) but also influenced, if in a less dramatic and comprehensive way, the nature of the myth. The changing historical events and circumstances of the 1990s and 2000s, in particular during the fourth cowboy presidency of George W. Bush, would usher in additional adjustments to the emphases and influence of the frontier myth. Events sometimes cause the structures to change. And once again over the two most recent decades, the power of the myth would work to confirm the supposition that such deeply entrenched stories communicated messages that did not require explanation and have had ongoing consequences for the development of American society and politics.

Chapter 6

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WAR ON TERROR AND THE FRONTIER MYTH

QUESTION: Do you want [Osama] bin Laden dead?

THE PRESIDENT: I want justice. There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” . . .

QUESTION: Are you saying you want him dead or alive, sir? Can I interpret—

THE PRESIDENT: I just remember—all I’m doing is remembering—when I was a kid, I remember that they used to put out there, in the Old West, a wanted poster. It said, “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” All I want—and America wants him brought to justice. That’s what we want.

—George W. Bush in an exchange with reporters, September 17, 2001

In The American Western, Stephen McVeigh asserted that during the postmodern Bill Clinton years of the 1990s, which looked toward “building bridges to the future,” the western “ebbed far away from the center of the American imagination.” But in the 2000s the conservative manifestation of the frontier myth that had established itself in the Reagan era reemerged quickly again in American presidential politics through the context of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. As McVeigh contends, Republican president George W. Bush’s repeated use of the word “remember” in the quotation used as the epigraph for this chapter is steeped in frontier myth and suggests tradition, nostalgia, and the previous triumph of American civilization over savagery.[1]

BUSH COMPARED WITH HIS FRONTIER PRESIDENT PREDECESSORS

A full century after the quintessential frontier president Theodore Roosevelt sat in the presidential saddle, conservative “Bush 43” likewise attempted to deploy western symbolism in the aftermath of 9/11 and, in particular, his prosecution of the Iraq War. The conservative structure of the myth had changed little in the years between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. There was never a resurgence of liberal cowboyism under President Clinton; instead the myth lay largely dormant during the 1990s and was reactivated by the event of 9/11. George W. Bush’s cowboy-speak sat well with many Americans at the early stages of the war on terror as the buckskinned president attempted to use western rhetoric to reaffirm the United States’ sense of identity and purpose on the international stage. With America as the heroic cowboy and Edward Said’s Oriental “other” as the enemy, Bush attempted to project many of the same values of western convention: a view of the world as an arena for the battle of light versus darkness where evildoers needed to be tracked down and punished along with its depictions of the heroic and special virtues of the United States. President Bush’s plainspoken, frontier, “dead or alive,” “smoke ’em out” talk was a direct style that, at least initially, was well received by many Americans, if not by most living outside of the United States. But while “going western” would work as a boon for Bush’s assertive policies in the early stages and even helped him win reelection in 2004, by his second term this reliance on the frontier myth fell as flat as it had for the liberal LBJ. When the war in Iraq, the economy, and events such as Hurricane Katrina went south for the Bush administration in its second term, the symbolism of the conservative frontier myth lost its power and influence over much of the American public and policy makers. In other words, the myth could only sustain policy so far before it collapsed under its own weight when events proved it incapable of doing what its proponents advocated. The myth’s eventual inapplicability to Johnson and Bush (though retaining some of the same language) was in part a product of American presidential discourse and policy but more generally it was a victim of changing historical events and circumstances.

Of the four presidents most closely associated with the frontier myth, George W. Bush was arguably the most contrived and self-conscious of the group. Bush and his team were anxious to move away from the apparently unsuccessful “Ivy League and pork rinds” mix of his one-term-president father, George H. W. Bush (Bush 41).[2] In particular, Bush 43 wanted to show no signs of being “in part a member of that Eastern Establishment that caused Barry Goldwater to propose sawing off the Atlantic seaboard and setting it adrift.”[3] Bush the younger had learned this lesson the hard way. In his late 1970s bid for a seat in Congress from Texas, he was portrayed by his Democratic opponent as a “Daddy’s boy, not from around heah.”[4] Having spent too many years away from the frontier, Bush lost the contest. According to his biographer Bill Minutaglio, Bush 43 believes he was later successful in his gubernatorial race against Democrat Ann Richards because of his team’s strategy to make “Dubya” even “more Texan” than his opponent.[5] Arguably, then, George W. Bush’s cowboy persona was perceived as vital for his own political survival as he needed a different kind of identity than the rest of his family.

In October 2008, at an event celebrating what would have been TR’s 150th birthday, George Bush compared himself to that first modern frontier president, telling Americans that Roosevelt “was a man who felt at home on a sprawling ranch in the West. He believed in the importance of a strenuous life of exercise. I can relate to that.”[6] Bush then described the Rough Rider portrait of Roosevelt on horseback that hung above the fireplace in what was TR’s former office, claiming that it had been a reminder to him as the occupant of the White House. “When I look at it I think about the character and courage that is necessary for any president.” Having excised TR’s liberal elements, Bush then proudly declared, “For the past eight years, his legacy has been an inspiration to me.”[7]

In many respects, though, TR and Bush appear to have had little in common. While Roosevelt was a Renaissance man, intellectual curiosity was viewed suspiciously in George W. Bush’s White House. The Rough Rider was distrustful of big business while Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney thrived in the halls of corporate power. Biographer Edmund Morris compared the disastrous Enron Corporation, a company that had been closer to the Bush administration than any other, as “a very good parallel” to the corporate trusts that Roosevelt had very publicly assailed as “malefactors of great wealth.”[8] Bush’s own “ranching” comparisons, meanwhile, seemed shaky at best given the twenty-first-century president’s apparent fear of horses.[9] These substantive differences leave the impression that President Bush’s admiration for the first frontier president was either misplaced or contrived and did not run much deeper than the surface.

But if Roosevelt’s liberal cowboy record could never be absorbed deeply into the conservative frontier mythology of the early twenty-first century, the Bush team had a more suitable frontier predecessor in mind: Ronald Reagan. Based on the actions of Bush and his team it would appear that they attempted to deploy the cowboy Reagan model, in terms of both style and substance, every time it had an opportunity. Just prior to his run for the presidency Bush purchased a sprawling ranch in the Texas Midlands near the town of Crawford. The ranch conjured up images of Reagan on horseback at Rancho del Cielo. Reagan used to disappear to his ranch and called it a vacation. But the more self-conscious Bush made it a blatant showcase of his authenticity. Ironically, like Reagan, Bush went to great lengths to run his ranch on ecologically sound principles while eliminating environmental regulation across the country.[10] For Bush this pure Old West scene replaced the connections to his family’s estate at Kennebunkport, Maine, which had been the home of the Bush family since the turn of the nineteenth century. The ranch would serve as the backdrop for the rest of the mythology tapped into by Bush and VP Dick Cheney and as a counter to the bureaucratic, Washington establishment. Bush, as with the Californian Reagan, would play the role of the “outsider.” And as LBJ had fully understood, doing business at the ranch gave a president the opportunity to play up the frontier narrative in place of the office’s associations with the urban capital. Cowboys and Indians magazine recognized the dichotomy right away: “The town of Crawford is about as far from Washington D.C. as a man could hope to get.”[11]

In terms of his own persona, George W. Bush may have gone to an elite prep school and then Yale, but despite the blue-blood schooling and family name he had the common touch and showed no evidence of snobbery. Many Americans liked that.[12] Sounding much like Reagan, he insisted that he believed strongly in a few core conservative beliefs including less government, lower taxes, and a greater reliance on the private sector and individual frontierlike initiative. And Bush had the advantage of not being the kind of scary, extremist, Goldwater-type conservative who pushed away too many middle-of-the-road voters. When he ran for president in 2000 he did not want people to be afraid of him or of his presidency and tried to soften some of the harsh and exclusionary language that some in the neoconservative movement employed. For example, as a candidate Bush the younger ran as a “compassionate conservative”; he spoke of showing compassion for the poor and disadvantaged but paradoxically claimed he could do this by reducing government: he never clearly articulated how this would work. He also was not willing to change his policies to win minority votes but was also not a racist and wanted to get past the kind of race-baiting and code words that his party had been using since the early 1960s.

On foreign policy, Bush insisted at the presidential debates that Americans should avoid nation building, avoid overcommitting the US military around the world, and not tell other nations the way they should run their own affairs. He ran hard on the character and morality issue and insisted that the country needed a change from the “X-rated” days of President Bill Clinton. In this vein, Bush tried to portray himself as a straight-shooter, a man of the regular people, one who used direct language and called things the way he saw them. Early on in the Bush presidency, Los Angeles Times editorialist Ronald Brownstein apparently bought into the image in his own comparison of Bush with Bill Clinton: “The White House seems to be telling voters that Bush may be a man of fewer words than his predecessor, but at least you can trust his words. In White House iconography, Bush is Gary Cooper to Clinton’s Elmer Gantry.”[13]

Bush could not attack Clinton (and by association, his vice president, Al Gore) as a tax-and-spend liberal since during his tenure the Democratic president had not only balanced the budget but had actually achieved government surpluses through very careful federal spending programs. But even this outstanding accomplishment was, remarkably, attacked as a major failure when Bush told Americans, “The surplus is not the government’s money; the surplus is the people’s money.” In Reaganesque style Bush pledged that if he were elected he would give the surplus back by cutting taxes.[14] For many Americans living in red (Republican-leaning) states and in small-town and rural America, Bush’s frontier atmospherics, laid-back manner, and promise of tax cuts seemed to help galvanize the Republican half of the electorate against Gore, Bush’s 2000 Democratic Party opponent. One sign hoisted during the 2000 campaign seemed to sum up the red-state sentiments: “This Country Needs Cowboys, Not Smarty Pants.”[15] The conservative frontier myth, like the liberal one of LBJ’s day, informed Americans that the rural-state regions best represented the “real” America—though the simpler vision of what that meant now represented the values of individualism and freedom over that of community and mutual help. This self-flattery played especially well in the flyover states and smaller cities, towns, and rural areas of the southern states (which George Bush swept in 2000 and 2004) and, apart from the Pacific states, in the West.

The Republican Party faithful had been longing for a new Reagan since Reagan. As Bill Keller of the New York Times wrote in 2003, for George W. Bush, “The analogy has the added virtue of providing an alternative political lineage; he’s not Daddy’s Boy, he’s Reagan Jr.” Two months prior to the start of the Iraq War, Keller added, “Some Republicans speak of the current era, with the culmination of Reagan’s ballistic missile defense and the continuing assault on marginal tax rates and, especially, the standing tall against global evil as the recommencing of the Reagan ‘revolution.’”[16] Britain’s The Economist agreed when it offered this response in 2004 to its own question, “To what extent is George Bush Mr. Reagan’s heir?”: “The similarities between the two men’s administrations are striking. Like Mr. Reagan, Mr. Bush prefers simplicity to nuance; like Mr. Reagan, he has made tax cuts and a huge defence build-up the signature tunes of his administration; like Mr. Reagan, he sees himself as engaged in a struggle with evil (this time an ‘axis’ not an ‘empire’); and like Mr. Reagan, he is widely regarded outside the United States as a dangerous cowboy.” The Economist piece noted that the parallels were “deliberate” as Bush attempted to model himself on Reagan rather than his own father.[17] Along with the “dangerous” cowboy comparisons, the propensity for large deficits (which dwarfed Reagan’s), and a perceived lack of smarts also loomed big in liberal journalists’ and scholars’ comparisons of the frontier politicians. Most Republicans and some moderates, however, were elated by the comparisons.[18] In a July 7, 2003 article entitled “Bring it on, Mr. President,” appearing on gopusa.com, Doug Patton declared: “We know exactly where he [President Bush] stands, and so do our enemies, just as they did with Reagan.”[19]

In this 2004 campaign bumper sticker (left), the Bush team attempts to transfer the iconic affection of American voters for the white-Stetsoned Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Democratic nonbelievers countered with a campaign button of their own (right) featuring “fake” cowboys of the GOP. (From the author’s collection)

Mark West and Chris Carey argue, convincingly, that after 9/11 in particular Bush and Cheney’s decision to go full bore in resurrecting frontier Reagan was part of a focused and deliberate effort to protect the Republican base and to challenge the majority of those remaining “Reagan Democrats” to stay on their side during wartime. Both major world events (Sahlins) and political realities (West and Carey) drove these comparisons. With the divide between the political parties widening, the targeted audience increasingly became their supporters in the winning red states.[20] In 2000 virtually every county with a cow in it went for Bush, while large cities were just as enthusiastic for Gore. As The Economist observed in 2004, “At home, Mr. Reagan had no choice but to reach out to Democrats, because in 1980, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by 17 percentage points. In today’s 50-50 America, Mr. Bush’s main priority is to galvanise his half of the electorate.”[21] There can be no doubt that Bush’s deployment of frontier imagery and symbolism, at least initially, helped secure his half for 2004.

THE EVENTS: 9/11 AND IRAQ

The policy issue most informed by the frontier myth was the response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. On that Tuesday morning, architectural symbols of American power, business in New York, the military headquarters of the Pentagon, and federal government institutions were either destroyed, damaged, or under intense threat. Prior to the events of that day, Bush had numerous ambitions for domestic policy and only a few major ones related to foreign policy. But after the attacks all other “competing priorities were reframed through a policy lens of a singular focus: ridding the world, but most specifically the United States, of the scourge of catastrophic terrorism.”[22] Here the shattering events of one day would bring about a change in the emphasis and, in some respects, structure of the frontier myth so that it would now attempt to accommodate policies of preemption and unilateralism in world affairs on an unprecedented scale. From 9/11 onward Bush had found his mission, his message, and as political scientist Stanley A. Renshon has contended, “his life’s purpose.”[23]

George W. Bush quickly placed his American crusade against terrorism within the context of the frontier myth by emphasizing some of its specific features. Almost immediately, the president’s language in speeches and news conferences began making references to the Old West, particularly popular images emphasizing savage enemies, justice, cowboys, hunters, and the wild frontier. Readying his troops like frontiersmen or a vigilante posse, Bush told Americans that he was sending their sons and daughters out into a wilderness that “knows no borders.”[24] The world was depicted once again as a new frontier, with the president and his nation as the gunslingers who would bring to justice those forces of evil threatening freedom and civilization: “This is a fight to say to the freedom-loving people of the world: we will not allow ourselves to be terrorized by somebody who thinks they can hit and hide in a cave somewhere.”[25] The “Wanted” poster that Bush had first alluded to in 2001 strongly resonated with the American public and the media. The New York Post was one of three Big Apple newspapers to publish posters featuring Osama bin Laden: its double-page “Wanted Dead or Alive” pull out was pasted up all over the city in store and residence windows and vehicles, sometimes with the “Alive” heavily scratched out.[26] Similarly, when Bush addressed the nation on the impending invasion of Iraq on March 17, 2003, he issued an ultimatum: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.”[27] A plethora of media articles and editorials around the world made connections between this announcement and George W. Bush acting like a sheriff who told the outlaws to get out of town or else. As one journal reported, “It sounded like Wyatt Earp telling the bad guy he had 48 hours to get out of Dodge.”[28] Bush, remembering that “old poster out West” from his days watching cowboy movies and TV as a kid, was now acting upon these ideas in the same manner in which his old celluloid heroes would have dispensed with a snake-eyed villain.

LBJ’s Vietnam, explored in chapter 3, has been widely understood in terms of the frontier myth. Similarly, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were cast as the most recent in a long line of battles “between savagery and civilization.” Symbolically, Iraq in particular became the newest frontier, the latest “Indian Country.” When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Fort [Kit] Carson in October 2003, he told the members of the Third Armored Cavalry Guard that served in Iraq, “In the global war on terror, U.S. forces, including thousands from this base, have lived up to the legend of Kit Carson, fighting terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan, hunting the remnants of the deadly regime in Iraq, working with local populations to help secure victory. . . . Few men have been chosen by destiny to serve their country as Kit Carson served, and fewer still have risen to the challenge.” Rumsfeld’s speech and performance for the historic Third Cavalry Color Guard in their nineteenth-century garb—steeped in nostalgia for a mythic past—was carefully choreographed to provide legitimacy to the invasion of Iraq with numerous references to settling the West. The implication was clear: just as the Third Cavalry had defeated a savage foe in the Indian Wars, the contemporary Third had led the charge into Iraq to root out current-day “insurgents.”[29]

In his September 17, 2001, remarks to Pentagon employees, President Bush had characterized his coalition as the gathering of a posse preparing to ride out and capture the enemy. “We are putting together a coalition that is a coalition dedicated to declaring to the world we will do what it takes to find the terrorists, to rout them out and to hold them accountable.”[30] Sounding again much like LBJ’s depictions of the Vietcong, the enemy was depicted by the president as both savage and cowardly. Al-Qaeda and their operatives are “an enemy that likes to hide and burrow in. . . . There’s no rules. It’s barbaric behavior. They slit throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective that is beyond comprehension and they like to hit and, then they like to hide out.”[31] No longer are these the heroic guerilla fighters, the Mujahideen who fought the Soviets in the 1980s and whom the Reagan administration praised as “freedom fighters.” Instead, like mythic Native Americans once portrayed as attacking towns and killing innocent settlers to satisfy their bloodthirsty cravings, the Islamic terrorists and their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan were painted as more animal-like than human. John Cawelti reminded us of an important formula of the classic western: the villains were so evil and repulsive, “the hero is both intellectually and emotionally justified in destroying them.”[32] Violence via Judge Colt was necessary in order to protect those higher values of law, peace, and domestic harmony.[33]

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thanks troops for “following in the footsteps of Christopher ‘Kit’ Carson,” October 7, 2003. (Unknown photographer, US Department of Defense)

The shattering events of 9/11 would result in President’s Bush’s emphasis on one feature of the myth’s structure in particular: employing frontier ethics, his administration frequently divided the world in terms of good versus evil. In The President of Good and Evil, Peter Singer claimed that George W. had employed the word “evil,” almost always as a noun, approximately one thousand times and in 319 speeches during the first year and a half of his presidency.[34] Rejecting moral relativism, Bush declared at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association meeting: “I view this current conflict as either us versus them [or] evil versus good. And there is no in between.” The war on terror was, in Bush’s own words, a showdown or “monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail.” Bush believed in “self-reliant” unilateralism and that nations perceived as evil must be strongly opposed by a tough and uncompromising America.[35] Further, the president made it clear on numerous occasions that the people of the world were either “with us or against us.” For Bush, there was no room for middle ground.[36]

As in classic western stories beginning with The Virginian, the president neither accommodated nor would he negotiate with the bad guys. And like John Wayne he wished to portray himself as a person of steadfast moral superiority who was acting on a “higher calling.”[37] American power under the guiding principles of the Bush Doctrine was said to be a force in the world for goodness and light: “There is no doubt in my mind we’re doing the right thing. Not one doubt,” Bush declared in one interview.[38] And the president went further than any of his wartime predecessors when he claimed not only that America and the forces of good would defeat its enemies but that Bush and his outriders of freedom would “rid the world of evil.”[39] Here Marshall Sahlins’s contention that major events can cause characteristics of a social or cultural structure to modify and transform is demonstrated once again. And now it was not only America’s enemies in specific nations that needed to be vanquished before the homeland of old could be restored, but all enemies around the globe (LBJ also harbored global ambitions for his Great Society).

Part of President Bush’s tough-guy strategy would be to throw aside those cultural and legal norms that he believed had prevented Americans from achieving an even playing field in its battle with the forces of darkness. For Bush, America could justify the use of extreme measures against enemies or possible enemies since it was not the same as when other nations used torture or other such methods. The United States, so the administration’s logic appeared to go, was by nature a moral nation that only tried to protect its people and principles against evil. As a result, its use of extreme measures was moral, because a nation of high principle had used them only under threat from evil people. Like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan, Bush was disgusted with procedural safeguards and international protocols that protected clever and sinister criminals from the severe punishments and harsh disciplinary treatment required to safeguard American society and to bring to justice those who would threaten innocent folks. In this view, torture and abuse of prisoners, denial of legal rights, extensive electronic surveillance, and in some instances even collateral damage were all justified and supported by the administration. While most liberals were opposed to these measures—arguing that violating treaties, international laws, and the code of simple human decency made the United States a broken and dishonored nation—conservatives and, at least initially, the majority of the public agreed that they had to fight fire with fire and appeared inspired by Bush’s moral absolutes and blazing certainties.

PRAIRIE CHAPEL RANCH AND FRONTIER IMAGERY

Bush 43 deliberately associated, visually, with popular imagery of the frontier West in several ways. Most significantly in 1999, just as he was about to embark on his 2000 presidential campaign, he purchased a sixteen-hundred-acre ranch at Prairie Chapel on the plains of central Texas. The ranch created the opportunity for the visual cowboy Bush to be seen wearing his Stetson, jeans, and boots while clearing brush on his ranch and driving around in his pickup truck, a working vehicle: this activity was intended to reinforce the message that Bush was a real frontiersman. The new western digs also helped him replace his connections to the family compound at Kennebunkport.

Bush spent 490 days of his presidency at the ranch near Crawford, Texas, considerably more time than the year Reagan spent at Rancho del Cielo. Bush entertained dignitaries much more than Reagan as well. According to the Washington Post, eighteen foreign leaders met with Bush at his Crawford ranch, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, and Bush’s “truest friend,” British prime minister Tony Blair.[40] Close allies were awarded with visits to the Bush “frontier” homestead while those who balked at the president’s views would have to meet up with him in the urban environment of DC or elsewhere. Amid a flurry of visits in the spring and summer of 2003, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart wryly observed of highly skeptical French president Jacques Chirac: “I doubt he’ll be coming to the ranch anytime soon.”[41]

Bush delivers remarks at a ceremony in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing. Unlike TR, LBJ, and Reagan, Bush often wore the cowboy attire in Washington, sending the message that whether home on the range in Texas or in DC, cowboy characteristics were an important part of his persona and identity. (Courtesy George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, P11402–06, December 22, 2001)

Interestingly, world leaders sometimes applied even more frontier credentials to Bush than did Bush himself. Vladimir Putin reportedly took horseback riding lessons in preparation for his visit to the president’s cowboy ranch but upon arriving realized that the president was a self-described “windshield rancher” who drove a pickup truck.[42] Liberal journalists mocked the fact that Bush could not ride a horse, that the two hundred head of cattle living on his ranch were owned by other ranchers who leased the property, and that his handlers knew well enough to keep him away from guns and even firewood. With these “typical cowboyesque skills” all out, one observer wrote, “Ultimately someone came up with the image of George W. Bush using a chain saw—a relatively easy-to-operate tool—which would provide some kind of action video for the president and the media.”[43] But even here Bush’s acumen came into question by skeptics. While Ronald Reagan actually did have a practical (along with his political) purpose in clearing miles of trails for riding on and also needed firewood, the New York Times could see little point to Bush’s efforts “to clear brush and dead trees out of a shadowy hollow . . . a place he calls ‘the amphitheater.’”[44]

After 9/11 the frontier visuals became a much more visible part of President Bush’s wardrobe. With the ranch as Bush’s backdrop and bedecked in his Stetson, buckskin jacket, and eelskin cowboy boots embossed with the seal of his office, once again a president called upon frontier-myth visuals to communicate substantive information about his leadership style—only in this case it was a chief executive’s uniform for fighting terrorism. Bush had invoked those familiar images, which invited Americans to think about his hawkish policy and leadership in terms of the frontier myth. Likewise, in both speeches and press conferences, what one journalist described as his “John Wayne rhetoric”[45] became much more pronounced among Bush and his inner circle as a means of expressing their determination to bring those behind the attacks and their allies to justice.

Meanwhile at the White House itself, trusted visitors frequently encountered several frontier paintings and statues; Bush’s own special attention was focused on A Charge to Keep, a W. H. D. Koerner painting that he had acquired. The president was so taken by it, in fact, that he took the painting’s name for his own prepresidential autobiography.[46] Bush believes that the image depicts circuit riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies during the nineteenth century: that it is the portrayal of a cowboy—who looked a lot like Bush himself—and also of a missionary of his own denomination. But in a case of unwanted irony, the president was incorrect about the title of the painting and its meaning. Koerner created the illustration for a western short story titled “The Slipper Tongue,” which was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916. In Scott Horton’s article in Harper’s, Jacob Weisburg explained that the story was about “a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska.” The painting actually depicts the thief attempting to flee from his captors, and the Post’s caption read, “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.” Rather than an inspiring evangelical Methodist, then, the man in the painting is actually a horse thief fleeing from a mob who wants him punished. “The president of the United States,” Horton concludes, “has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. In fact that man is a wily criminal one step out in front of justice.”[47]

In the real world, trouble came for President Bush with his equally erroneous and premature bragging about a “mission accomplished” in Iraq—just two months into the invasion. Ray Allen Billington reminded us that “optimism” had always been an “outstanding feature” of the frontier experience, but when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, casualties continued to mount, and only a few joined in Bush’s Coalition of the Willing, skeptics in America toward both the mission and the Bush version of the myth began to multiply. By the end of June 2003 the president’s once-firm footing at home had become noticeably shaky.

George W. Bush’s official White House portrait by artist John Howard Sanden. A Charge to Keep appears over the president’s right shoulder. (© 2012 White House Historical Association)

At this point, VP Dick Cheney stepped in to control the damage by deploying the imagery of cowboy Reagan. Cheney insisted in interviews and meetings with the press that President Bush was doing exactly what Ronald Reagan would have done in Iraq. His repeated key phrase was, “I saw the conviction and moral courage of Ronald Reagan.” Indeed the Reagan comparisons cropped up twenty-one times in Cheney’s interviews and speechmaking in the latter half of 2003, and they were typically accompanied by the use of western symbolism.[48] The cowboy talk, Mark West and Chris Carey point out, was hardly coincidental. The coordinated efforts of the two revealed part of a deliberate strategy to deploy the frontier myth to the party faithful in stump speeches occurring at vital moments—first early in the war in Afghanistan and now throughout the war in Iraq.

THE BUSH DOCTRINE AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

In a dramatic shift in American foreign policy, President Bush announced in June 2002 a fundamental change from the strategy of containment of America’s enemies (the previous Cold War strategy) to one of preemption. The president declared, “Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.”[49] Bush, Cheney, and company’s ideas about preemptive military action fit with the view that problems on the frontier required a quick and decisive response to be resolved. Like the pioneers, frontiersman, and cowboy of popular myth, Bush claims the right to self-defense, only here he extends it to authorizing preemptive attacks against potential aggressors and the goal of cutting them off before they are able to attack the United States. The frontier-myth structure—throttled by the events of 9/11—would now be pushed to the edge with respect to promoting action prior rather than solely responding to specific perceived crises. American forces in Afghanistan and later Iraq would not be an invasion but an act of self-defense. To defend the United States, Bush had to show his steely cowboy determination: that he meant what he said and that he meant business. And Bush was not willing to wait for others to help. He would dispense with geopolitics and go with his “instincts” to act first and think later. “The Bush Doctrine is actually being defined by action, as opposed to by words,” Bush told NBC’s Tom Brokaw in a 2003 interview on board Air Force One.[50]

Rejecting the collective security approach embraced by liberals for most of the twentieth century, Bush insisted on the right of the United States to go it alone decisively in the face of a perceived threat against itself. His belief in “self-reliant” unilateralism supposedly reflected the frontiersman’s tough-mindedness and independence and meant there would be little compromise with allies. When the Bush administration lost the UN Security Council vote in 2003 and was denied authorization to launch a war against Iraq, it rejected the international rules and rustled up a small “coalition”—a posse that would go it alone. Britain under Prime Minister Tony Blair was the United States’ one major stalwart ally during the Iraq War. The Guardian described Britain’s involvement in a discussion of the grounds for war as follows: “The truth is that Tony Blair is going into this inquiry the way he went into the war itself: as Tonto to the American Lone Ranger.”[51]

The Bush Doctrine of preemption also emphasized its willingness to act individually without allies when necessary. Bush’s unilateral implementation of action at the United Nations prompted Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette to compare the president to Will Kane—the brave but isolated sheriff of the 1952 film High Noon.[52] Kelly writes that “Bush’s U.N. speech on Saddam Hussein eerily resembled the script of the greatest Western of all time, High Noon.” Kelly misread the anti-McCarthyism message of the filmmakers themselves; instead he and many others on the right, including Bush himself, saw this go-it-alone foreign policy as representing the “individualism” strand of the frontier myth. Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribune agreed with this popular perception: “[Bush’s] is a vision of pioneer America, where sturdy frontiersmen didn’t wait for the government. They went out and tamed the wilderness with their own two hands.”[53] Related to this, the president claimed morality was at stake. “At some point,” Bush said, “we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with me.”[54] In practice, Bush’s unilateralist approach to the international community was demonstrated not only in Iraq but also in his decisions to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia (originally signed with the Soviet Union), against widespread objections; his refusal to offer any endorsement of the Kyoto accord on global warming; and his insistence that the United States would not be participating in the International Criminal Court. To an even greater degree than Ronald Reagan, Bush saw the demands of an individual nation (America) on the international stage as trumping those of cooperation in the global community. With Bush we have another example of a president attempting to push the parameters of the myth to new limits in response to broader events.

George W. Bush’s administration also hoped to promote itself as representing the kinds of values associated with cowboy movies, such as The Magnificent Seven or Shane,[55] with the United States in the role as the mythic protector of innocents in the global community against the bad-guy terrorists. The gifted individuals featured in these two movies have both the power and the responsibility to act—sometimes in the name of the community—but even against the will of the community if for the community’s own good. The president knew what was best for the world, and his bellicose doctrine allegedly included a sense of responsibility to help weaker nations that were unable to defend themselves. In his speech of September 20, 2001, Bush 43 described his vision for American leadership. “The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us.”[56] As LBJ had once said in relation to his “little booger” allies, the South Vietnamese, Bush said of the Afghanistan mission that “I wanted us to be viewed as the liberator.”[57] In Iraq, meanwhile, he would take down the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to help the weak and relieve a nation where “there is immense suffering.”[58] Like Shane and other gunslinger heroes, the president was there to dispense justice in a hostile and highly dangerous post–Cold War world. Unlike some of his more thoughtful cowboy “counterparts,” though, Bush seemed less concerned with thinking actions and their consequences through first and more concerned with doing. And by deploying the frontier myth in ways that raised expectations so incredibly high, Bush, Cheney, and others were potentially setting up themselves and their associations with the myth for later disappointment and failure.

As the conflict in Iraq wore on, the administration’s and nation’s adherence to the myth of the West created similar problems for Bush to those that had sunk LBJ. Like Johnson, President Bush kept insisting that the old American hope of freedom just around the corner was out there to grasp on these far-off frontiers and that democracy and freedom would be the foundation for international peace. Assigning a redemptive role to the United States, he raised great hopes for a brighter future, committed substantial American forces to spread democracy and attain peace but once again miscalculated the outcome in terms of underestimated costs and unanticipated consequences. LBJ biographer Robert A. Divine wrote that Americans who have “fought perpetual war for perpetual peace” have often found it difficult to bring a closure to conflicts. “For the United States at least, war is a messy and unpredictable way to deal with international problems. Americans enter into conflicts convinced that they can create a better and more stable world once their enemies are defeated, only to meet with unexpected outcomes and a new set of challenges.”[59] Precisely these unexpected outcomes and challenges would overwhelm Bush’s administration during its second term and cause the myth itself to be viewed increasingly as out of touch with the realities of the twenty-first century.

GEORGE W. BUSH: GENUINE OR FAKE FRONTIER PRESIDENT?

Americans, and traditional allies overseas, had strong reactions to George W. Bush and his frontier persona—and those Bush administration policies with the closest ties to the frontier myth were also the most hotly contested. Almost immediately after 9/11, Bush enjoyed a dramatic and seemingly united surge in popularity, but as time passed, a growing wave of criticism and distrust emerged. Overall, within the United States itself, Bush’s frontier persona was initially viewed in a more positive than negative light. But in the post-Reagan era, it produced decidedly more affirmative responses from conservative members of the public and more critical ones from those holding liberal viewpoints.

For supporters of President Bush, his character was one of the qualities that they admired most. At first, many of those who did not agree with his policies appeared to admire those aspects of Bush’s character associated with cowboys. “They might break with President Bush on the war in Iraq or on illegal immigration,” observed Timothy Egan of the New York Times, “but not with the man himself.”[60]

MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews, who would later turn vehemently against President Bush, hailed him in May 2003 as epitomizing the national character: “Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal. . . . He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. . . . We’re proud of our president.” At the outset of the Iraq War at least, Matthews saw Bush as an uncomplicated man of few words, a Marlboro Man type and “can-do,” self-reliant “type of guy” with a dislike for the “indoors.”[61] Conservative online articles, such as Andrew Bernstein’s “In Defense of the Cowboy,” similarly lauded Bush’s supposed courage, self-reliance and straight-shooting talk. “What we honor about the cowboy of the Old West,” wrote Bernstein, “is his willingness to stand up to evil and to do it alone, if necessary. The cowboy is a symbol of the crucial virtues of courage and independence.” Conversely, Bernstein described Europeans who criticized the United States as “worse than the timid shopkeeper in an old Hollywood Western. They don’t merely want to avoid confronting evil—they seek to prevent anyone else from recognizing evil and standing up to it.” Indeed Bernstein argued that the only possible legitimate criticism of the president was that he was not cowboy enough.[62]

In the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, American observers enthusiastically embraced frontier exceptionalism by identifying the differences between the United States and “Old Europe.” In a line seemingly drawn right out of the Turner thesis, freelance journalist Wayne Lutz claimed that, as opposed to Europe, America was built by rugged individuals possessing the moral clarity of the frontier folk: men and women who were willing to take risks to carve out a better world for themselves. Writing for the Sun News, Kathleen Parker declared, “The world has become a global Dodge City. Lucky for us, a Wild West sheriff is in charge.” The National Review’s William F. Buckley concurred and insisted that Saddam Hussein needed to be ousted from power in Iraq. To do this would take the kind of cowboy thinking where men of action and courage would leave ambiguity behind in favor of taking down the evildoer, as opposed to the kind of cowardice demonstrated by the French and the Germans.[63] The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pulled no punches: “European sophisticates pride themselves on seeing the world in shades of gray. But when people look at them, all they see are shades of yellow.”[64] Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld likewise dismissed the mounting opposition in Germany and France by describing those countries in mythic terms as “Old Europe,” and saying in so many words that, in the Bush White House, the views of these nations no longer mattered.[65] These two tenets of the frontier myth—American exceptionalism and its accompanying sense of mission—were very much alive and well among conservative ideologues and others during the early Bush years.

Outside the United States, George Bush’s major supporter in the Iraq War, British prime minister Tony Blair, was described by the president as the United States’ “truest friend” and by many in the media as his faithful deputy. In the case of one cartoon, Blair was “faithful Indian companion” Tonto to the Bush’s Lone Ranger (as also described in The Guardian).[66] Curiously, though, Bush’s relationship with Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi was the collaboration most obviously tied to the frontier myth. Over a four-year period the two men proudly nurtured a common identity as dual inheritors of the legacy of High Noon’s Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper). Their first visit at Camp David had resulted in mutual pronouncements of a new and very positive relationship based on “comparing themselves to the lone, stoic and honor-bound marshal” played by Gary Cooper.[67] Just two weeks after the terrorist attacks, on September 25, Koizumi visited the White House and left with a framed copy of the film poster for the movie—a gift that the prime minister said he “treasures.” Bush, according to the Christian Science Monitor, had “dubbed Koizumi ‘Gary Cooper,’ after the sheriff of High Noon.”[68] Far Eastern sheriff Koizumi publicly assured the president, however, that while “Gary Cooper fought a lonely battle against a gang . . . this time the whole world stands with the United States.”[69]

For President Bush, it was especially important to be able to disseminate his administration’s plans quickly and widely without the added complication of having to explain and rationalize the specifics: the frontier myth appeared the ideal vehicle. It offered him a tactical tool for articulating his message to a diverse audience that played upon powerful ideas already heavily entrenched in American culture. At first, as we have seen, this approach was widely accepted at home and by a small number of leaders abroad. But unlike “Cooper-san,” few national leaders outside the United States or their citizens viewed George Bush’s frontier persona and mission, particularly in Iraq, as authentic or noble. Significantly, like most Europeans, the Japanese public had strongly opposed the Iraq invasion from the outset.[70] The frontier myth was an American myth that never held a grip on foreign leaders and the public in other nations. And as the immediate urgency of September 11 faded over time and the Iraq War dragged on, the criticism of Bush grew more and more intense on his home turf as well, as the frontier myth lost its ability to either explain or motivate.

These fissures within the United States were clearly in evidence during Bush’s second term. Liberals—and, as time passed, moderates as well—pointed to serious inconsistencies in Bush’s handling of foreign affairs. For these folks, Will Kane was a more thoughtful, reluctant hero who did a job that needed to be done out of a sense of obligation rather than with a John Wayne–style, guns-blazing bravado. To critics, Bush (along with Cheney and Rumsfeld) seemed increasingly intent on forcing his will on others, even when most of the world wanted no part of his invasion of Iraq. Just as galling to those holding on to the older liberal version of the myth, Bush appeared to be using faux cowboy credentials and methods to conjure up public support. Some liberal American critics at home challenged the idea directly that Bush genuinely adhered to frontier values and found his cowboy atmospherics so artificial that it undermined his overall legitimacy. Eric Baard of the Village Voice pulled no punches in 2004: “George Bush is a fake cowboy. From media accounts, you’d reckon that the president was a buckaroo to the bones. He plays up the image, big-time, with $300 designer cowboy boots, a $1,000 cowboy hat. . . .”[71] His purchase of a ranch just before his presidential campaign only reinforced Baard and others’ belief that it was all for the sake of Bush manipulating the frontier myth in order to also manipulate his own imagery. Buying a ranch, clearing brush, and wearing cowboy attire did not make him a western hero. Deana Duke Arbuckle also insisted in her 2003 column in The Oregonian, “This president is no cowboy.” Arbuckle, herself married to a retired cowman, explained that a genuine cowboy “tends to his own herd and his own land. He mends his own fences. He never intrudes on his neighbor without an invitation. He makes a good neighbor . . . he minds his own business and wouldn’t tell the people next door how to live.”[72]

In an editorial analyzing how Bush fit or should fit into the western hero’s image, the president fared poorly. The publisher of the Anniston (AL) Star wrote that the Bush administration had “blurred the quiet cowboy as a self-defining allegory” by being more like a “bad-humored 20-foot American cowboy [who] tells the whole saloon he’s going to drill the 3-foot bad guy, who doesn’t stand a chance.” Like Gary Cooper, the Anniston Star contended, Americans looked up to the image fulfilled by Sheriff Kane in High Noon: the thoughtful, quiet cowboy who fought only when an outlaw forced him to take action to defend what was right. Susan Faludi of the New York Times called Bush out directly: “The president’s actions have violated the basic terms of the American Western romance and, thereby, the terms by which we call ourselves Americans. He’s declared war on a foundational national myth.” Here was perhaps the most forthright example of a journalist apparently attempting to reassert the liberal frontier myth by insisting that the Republican president and those on the right were acting in direct opposition to the myth’s ideals. If many conservatives had supported forceful, unilateral action, liberals increasingly saw this as a mistake by an unchecked president who had taken the myth to extremes and by association inflicted severe damage on the myth’s viability and persuasiveness.[73]

In Europe, much of the media’s critical reaction to Bush’s style of diplomacy was summed up in 2005 by Yale diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis. He wrote in Diplomatic History that “President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq [despite widespread foreign criticism] provoked complaints that great power was being wielded without great responsibility, followed by an unprecedented collapse of support for the United States abroad. From nearly universal sympathy in the weeks after September 11, Americans within a year and a half found their country widely regarded as an international pariah.”[74] As early as May 2002, when the president traveled to Germany to try to obtain support in Europe for a war in Iraq, NBC Nightly News reported that the “German media are portraying Bush as a Rambo-like cowboy intent on going after Saddam Hussein with or without Europe’s support.”[75] This was not the charming LBJ Ranch–style frontier myth that had been presented to Chancellor Ludwig Erhard back in 1963 but instead an arrogant, reckless, and aggressive presidential gunslinger who was out of his league and a danger to rather than a protector of international stability. The next year, the then editor of the Daily Mirror in London, Piers Morgan, complained that Bush’s version of the cowboy centered on a domineering man of action who always had to get his way. “I think people look at him [Bush] and think John Wayne. We in Europe like John Wayne, we liked him in cowboy films. We don’t like him running the world.”[76] During Bush’s first term, then, the frontier myth served as an interpretive framework for Americans but not for non-Americans in other nations. By his second term, the post-9/11 myth that his administration had nurtured would falter with Americans as well.

From 2001 through the 2004 presidential election, overall support for Bush held as conservatives and independents, initially, accepted Bush’s version of the frontier myth and his contention that he had kept the nation secure after 9/11 with his posse in the Middle East and vigilance at home. In what may have been key to the election’s outcome, 54 percent of voters polled believed that Americans were better protected and safer from terrorism than they were four years earlier, while 41 percent believed that they were less safe.[77] The majority of Americans in early November 2004 still accepted the need for an aggressive and mostly unilateralist approach to foreign relations using overwhelming force to ensure security at home and the promotion of American interests abroad.

By 2005 George W. Bush’s approach to foreign policy had become the target of increasing ridicule and derision from mainstream cartoonists and editorialists not only abroad but within the United States. The conservative frontier myth that had worked with considerable effectiveness within the United States for more than three years was in trouble. (“Baby Bush,” Daryl Cagle, #15532, May 8, 2005)

In its first term, the Bush administration had pushed the structural parameters of the conservative frontier myth to new limits. Bush had shifted foreign policy on world frontiers from one of containment to a policy of preemption. High expectations for success in spreading American-style democracy in the Middle East—and to rid the globe of evil—proved impossible to fulfill. And cowboy Bush, unlike Shane or the Virginian, was not slow to anger but instead promoted hard-charging, violent action to head off trouble in Iraq—for reasons that proved false—rather than responding to a crisis. Even after losing the UN Security Council vote on Iraq, the inflexible, optimistic Bush went ahead and raised his own invasion posse. LBJ, though likewise proceeding on false pretense based on authority from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, had at least tacit support for his Vietnam policy from most of the US allies. And Bush’s “self-reliant” unilateralist approach to the international community also encompassed missile testing, environmental issues, and the international criminal court. President Bush’s determination to act first and think through the consequences later—using the conservative myth’s tropes of American exceptionalism, individualism, and six-gun justice—was also in contrast to the strategic thinking and “speak softly” approach of frontier president Theodore Roosevelt a century before and even diverted from the style of his idol, Ronald Reagan, who in terms of the actual use of force was a compromising and cautious conservative.

In the mid-2000s, when events abroad and domestically spiraled out of control and beyond the limits of American power, support for Bush’s policies faltered at home. Foreign nations, especially in Europe, had already resented the Bush administration’s insistence on its supremacy over the Old World and put little if any stock in the conservative, American frontier myth’s explanations and accommodations of Bush’s post-9/11 foreign policy. For non-Americans living in the twenty-first century, the myth itself was foreign. Liberals who had still held to liberal elements of the myth from the pre-hinge era had likewise found these thoughtful elements noticeably absent from George W. Bush’s vigilante approach that now included torture, abuse of prisoners abroad, and extensive electronic surveillance. When his policies both at home and abroad met with little success, these same liberals, and some moderates as well, became even more openly hostile toward their fake-cowboy president. The events of the Iraq War were crushing the frontier myth’s interpretive persuasiveness and sapped the vision of its power to be an explanatory narrative through which the world could be understood. Ironically, Bush found himself in a similar position with Iraq that LBJ had found himself with Vietnam vis-à-vis the frontier myth.

THE DECLINE OF THE CONSERVATIVE FRONTIER MYTH

As events in the Middle East and the economy at home seemed to worsen in 2005–6, even conservative Americans increasingly perceived the frontier presidency as having failed under Bush—though the myth itself would endure for them, be it in a familiar and reassuring, if retooled, form. Changing historical events and circumstances in his second term, both at home and abroad, along with presidential discourse that no longer seemed to match these events, pulled the momentum away from Bush and forced the frontier-myth brand to fall back on its pre-9/11 Republican default: Ronald Reagan.

The post-9/11 generation was not the post–World War II generation, and with the Vietnam experience looming large, a greater segment of the American public was now more inclined than in earlier decades to question the validity of foreign wars or international adventures once it became obvious the United States was not winning. This skepticism set in increasingly as the president’s claims of a “mission accomplished” in Iraq proved hollow. By the mid-2000s, the conservative myth’s explanation for events and claims of their inevitable victory over lesser nations were unraveling. Given the fact that George W. Bush came to the White House with the intention of paring down America’s commitments around the globe, it is ironic that after 9/11 this “reluctant sheriff” would lead a massive commitment of American resources abroad that would include a full-scale invasion of Iraq. After successfully ousting Saddam Hussein, the United States immediately began dropping the ball in its efforts to bring order and stability to that troubled nation. Whatever damage was done to America’s reputation during the invasion itself, the damage done in the years that followed was much greater.

Ultimately, the war on terror would come to be viewed more as a source of division than of unity. “In a fracturing world,” Robert Kagan observed in Foreign Affairs, “the only thing worse than a self-absorbed hegemon is an incompetent self-absorbed hegemon.” Polls show that Bush’s popularity at home peaked at close to 90 percent after 9/11, but fell at an almost steady rate throughout the rest of his administration, bottoming out at under 30 percent a few weeks before he left office.[78] By 2005 and 2006 it was becoming increasingly evident that the “civilizing values” of American society were not taking hold in Iraq or the Arab world: Osama bin Laden had not been brought to justice; with the dictator Hussein gone and no weapons of mass destruction found, Iraq began fracturing into opposing sects with a long history of hatred for one another; and the toll in American and civilian lives and resources spent continued to grow as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan ground on with no end in sight. Except among some conservatives, George Bush’s deployment of the frontier myth had lost its interpretive power, and as such the events that had precipitated use of the myth needed to be explained in new ways; the frontier myth had been, as during the Vietnam War, transformed.

BUSH’S GLOBAL SIX-GUNS GO BACK IN THE HOLSTER

While the American press and public were initially favorable toward Bush’s frontier rhetoric, as the war in Iraq dragged on and casualties and costs mounted, Americans became much less approving. Bush had promised to bring the perpetrators to justice, but Osama bin Laden, rather than having been “smoked out” of his cave, was instead allowed to escape from the hills of Afghanistan to somewhere else—presumably Pakistan. Iraqis and Afghans were supposed to embrace democracy and freedom, but the nations instead were riddled with sectarian conflict, corruption, and chaos. Al-Qaeda, though weakened, continued to make its presence known through the media and in follow-up bombing attacks in Madrid and throughout Iraq. The Taliban in Afghanistan, though initially set on the run by the US armed forces and its allies, was now on the rebound. And in Iraq, Sunnis, Kurds, and Shiites divided the country instead of bringing it together under the democratic elections of a tamed Middle East frontier. The values of freedom, entrepreneurialism, democracy, and liberty that the Bush team had promised would follow the “liberation” of these nations had still not come to pass. Simultaneously, by late 2005 and 2006, the magic persuasive power of the frontier myth, Bush style, had faded. The myth had not delivered as promised as events did not match the structure that the Bush team had believed in, promoted, and worked so hard to reinforce. Rhetorical uses of frontier mythology no longer seemed capable of persuading Americans that they did not need to understand the complexity of Middle East politics, or that foreign policy could be interpreted through John Wayne’s eyes. Bush himself appeared to begin doubting his own approach. In this milieu, reliance on the myth began to retract noticeably.

In a January 2005 interview with Barbara Walters, the president said he would now “be more disciplined in how I say things,” adding, “I’ll have to be cautious about conveying thoughts in a way that doesn’t send the wrong impressions about our country.”[79] But having earlier deployed a narrow conservative version of the myth on such a large scale and with such fervor, Bush could not shake his own image of a kind of reckless, international yahoo. If the frontier myth still had symbolic power to motivate Americans, Bush had clearly lost the ability to control the myth or to define which western cowboy he was. As much as he may have wanted to be Marshal Matt Dillon, Americans (like their European erstwhile allies) were coming to see Bush more as the uneducated and impulsive cowpuncher who arrived in Dodge after the cattle drive—unaware of Matt Dillon’s determination to promote law and order and, as such, hell-bent on provoking bar fights and in other ways stirring up trouble with people he neither really knew nor understood. For some observers the cozy relationship between powerful oil companies and the Bush administration caused some Americans to detect a high level of skullduggery. As in the old poster of LBJ picking his dogs up by their ears, Bush was viewed as one who meddled too much in others’ affairs, and now the nation was paying the price. The American administration had cowboys, but it did not have a Marshal Dillon. The administration now understood this too.

Changing historical events and circumstances abroad and at home, along with presidential discourse that no longer seemed to match present conditions, had pulled the frontier myth momentum away from Bush. The president’s measured response to North Korean missile tests in the summer of 2006 seemed to confirm what Gary J. Bass, political scientist at Princeton, calls “doctrinal flameout.” Time noted, “Put another way: cowboy diplomacy, RIP.”[80] Now Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, wrote in the conservative National Review, “The Beltway consensus is that the beleaguered president has finally learned that he cannot posture as the lone ranger on the frontier. Instead he has concluded that, in a sophisticated world where all nations are interdependent, there is no place for his ‘smoke ’em out,’ ‘dead or alive’ Weltanschauung—or even for those post-9/11 photo-ops in which he drove his pickup around the ranch to chainsaw brush while wearing a Stetson and shades.”[81]

Professor Geoff Smith agreed and indicated that the president’s Lone Ranger image had exchanged “altruism for arrogance.”[82] Inevitably, it seemed, a bold headline “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy” donned the cover of Time on July 17, 2006, and featured a George W. Bush bobblehead engulfed in a giant straw cowboy hat.[83] The widely publicized cover and accompanying article seemed to sum up the situation for many of its readers. Frontier Bush was in decline, and Democratic presidential primary candidate Hillary Clinton was among those critics who got plenty of mileage out of the headline. Addressing a large crowd near Oakland, California, Clinton stated that on her first day as president she would send out her diplomats around the world to deliver the message, “The era of cowboy diplomacy is over.”[84] Now a prominent Democrat was openly rejecting not just conservative elements of the frontier myth but the symbolism of the myth itself.

To some degree Hillary Clinton and other Americans, especially those on the left, have likely been influenced in their views of the frontier myth, either directly or indirectly, not only by events and perceived failures of their conservative rivals in the political arena but by the work of New West scholars such as Richard White and Patricia Limerick as well. Limerick, for example, had directly challenged popular beliefs about the Frontier West in her influential book The Legacy of Conquest. Here Limerick picked up on many of the same arguments made three decades earlier by Earl Pomeroy and others, when she contends that Turner had it all wrong. She also asserted that the conquest of the West, with its inherent racism and economic exploitation, had more in common with the legacy of slavery in the South than with claims for the advancement of a superior civilization. Writing in the waning days of the Reagan administration, she took on Reagan himself by explaining how the president evoked simplified and ethnocentric images of the West. Limerick contended that while she and other New West scholars “explored conflict, unintended consequences, and complexities in Western history,” presidents typically saw “only freedom, opportunity, and abundance in the same story.”[85] The lack of impact the New West historians were having in the mid-1980s was lamented by Limerick herself, who confessed that their published efforts had “not rippled out to residents or the public.”[86] But in the wake of Iraq and other foreign frontier quagmires, these revisionist arguments appear to be gaining more traction among liberals and some moderates again in the twenty-first century.

AMERICA GETS BUSHWHACKED IN IRAQ AND AT HOME

The frontier myth failed to successfully deal with and accommodate 9/11; consequently, the Bush Doctrine failed most blatantly in the particular place that the United States tried to apply it. The myth’s assertion that America was an exceptional country and that those who opposed the values that their nation stood for—freedom, democracy, and liberty—were the United States’ enemies rang as hollow as US foreign policy. Americans were told through the myth that once Saddam was defeated, Iraqis would quickly embrace American values. At first the war went well. Iraq’s army was quickly defeated and Saddam deposed and captured. Vice President Dick Cheney assured Americans that the Iraqis would welcome the American and British forces as liberators and that Iraq would soon be the beacon for democracy in the Middle East.[87] Instead, Americans were viewed by most as conquerors.[88] Iraq’s Shiites and Sunnis were soon at each other’s throats. When they were not fighting each other, they waged a war of liberation against the United States. American casualties mounted, and Bush was “dumbfounded.”[89] By the end of Bush’s presidency, the war would see roughly forty-two hundred Americans killed and more than ten times that number wounded. About a hundred thousand Iraqis had been killed, and the war had cost more than $1 trillion.[90] Much of the media and public were also sickened by the harsh torture methods used against the enemy, along with reported abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons.[91] Good cowboys like Gene Autry would never tolerate, let alone endorse, such atrocities. In time, Americans had come to understand that this terrible carnage had been the result of poor intelligence as Bush administration assumptions about weapons of mass destruction and links between Iraq and al-Qaeda—the two primary rationales for the invasion from the outset—proved false. Over time, the myth’s ability to sustain American support for the war faltered, then collapsed.

Some members of the press and scholars as well keenly identified the frontier myth’s eventual inapplicability to presidents Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush. USA Today founder Al Neuharth advised Bush to follow the lead of another cowboy president: “Maybe Bush should take a cue from a fellow Texan, former president Lyndon Baines Johnson [who] after mismanaging the Vietnam War . . . turned tail and rode off into the sunset of his Texas ranch.”[92] Events that had rendered earlier expressions of the myth less viable to Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s would do much the same for the George W. Bush Republicans in the 2000s. But this time there was a twist, as conservative Bush’s frontier approach was being compared unfavorably to Ronald Reagan’s. Historian Douglas Brinkley, for example, likened Bush to a poker player “who bet all his chips on Iraq, and it hasn’t come out the way he wanted.” Brinkley points out the difference with cowboy Reagan: “When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But [Reagan] didn’t stick us in a war with no exit.”[93]

The impotence of Bush’s cowboy symbolism in war was not the only reason that Americans were growing suspicious of the president’s ability to lead effectively. Compounding Bush’s troubles was Mother Nature in the form of Hurricane Katrina. The event of Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf States in late August 2005, killing nearly two thousand Americans (almost half as many as had died in Iraq) and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The relief effort was miserable, and Americans were not pleased. Some likely wondered if conservatives’ antigovernment rhetoric had gone too far and become part of the problem.[94] Despite the happy stories Reagan had told, in the case of Katrina a strong government that could take control was not the problem, it was the solution, and the conservative frontier myth provided no corrective models from which Bush could draw.

If epic fails in foreign affairs and disaster relief were not enough, the mostly unexpected collapse of the economy because of the subprime mortgage crisis would come to overshadow even the war on terror in the 2008 presidential race. The bonanza economic policies that George Bush had trumpeted and implemented during his presidency proved to have disastrous results that emerged just months before the election. In a hugely powerful capital market that had been almost completely deregulated—bringing unprecedented earnings to American bankers and financiers—the wheels fell off and the bubble burst as trillions of dollars in US assets were lost and the world financial system, led by the United States, teetered on the brink of collapse. The conservative principle of deregulation and belief in the power of the unrestrained free market had, in the end, caused the problems. And to add to Republican woes over time, traditional conservative opposition to equality for a majority of Americans, including women, minorities, and gays, had placed them on the wrong side of history. When Bush left office in January 2009, the conservative movement he had led, like the American economy, was in trouble. The events of Iraq and Katrina had proven too much for the narrowly defined conservative frontier myth, and its interpretative power as a model for action and a predictor of the future sputtered in disrepute.

COWBOY CONSERVATISM IN SHAMBLES

With the complete collapse of Bush’s frontiers for freedom abroad and prosperity at home, the public’s verdict on Dubya at the end of his presidency was overwhelmingly negative. In a December 2008 Pew Research Center survey, just 11 percent said Bush would be remembered as an outstanding or above-average president—by far the lowest positive end-of-term rating for any president since the 1970s. During the Bush years, the government brand also took a major beating. In the same Pew survey, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the American public said that his administration would be remembered more for its failures than for its successes, and a plurality of 34 percent believed that Bush would be remembered in history as a poor president. When asked to describe President Bush in a word, three of the four most common responses in 2008 were negative: “incompetent,” “honest,” “idiot,” and “arrogant.” Except for “honest” (as some Americans apparently blamed others, and not Bush, for the administration’s falsification of claims about weapons of mass destruction), none of these words had anything in common with the cowboy code Bush learned growing up. Outside of the United States, a survey showed that the majority of respondents in nineteen of the twenty-four nations—including several strong US allies—also had little confidence in Bush as he neared the end of his presidency. The year before, a survey of forty-five nations had found extensive anti-American sentiment, as well as increasing disapproval for key aspects of American foreign policy.[95]

When Bush first took office in 2001, the GOP had control of Congress as well as the presidency. But during Bush’s second term there was a significant shift in party preferences as a failing war overseas and unregulated, free-market economics at home—facilitated with the help of frontier-myth symbolism—took their toll on George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders. In the 2006 midterm elections, more moderates and independents aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, which took control of both the House and the Senate. The public’s appetite for military involvement overseas, meanwhile, had diminished dramatically.[96]

The most telling poll numbers for Bush personally were his presidential job approval ratings. When asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as President?,” the response of the American public reached its high point of 90 percent approval and 6 percent disapproval on September 21–22, 2001. By October 2008 he stood at a 25 percent approval and 71 percent disapproval rating. Since September 2001 Bush’s approval trajectory fell at an almost steady rate of decline throughout the rest of his administration. America’s faith in the most recent incarnation of the frontier myth structure would take a beating as well, eventually compelling its remaining conservative adherents to fall back on the memory of Ronald Reagan, their old cowboy-president standby.[97] In the meantime, the overt conservative expressions caused many liberals and moderates to put further distance between themselves and the frontier myth as they came to perceive it as incapable of explaining the reality of the twenty-first-century world and a betrayal of the more inclusive frontier mythology of TR and LBJ.

EPILOGUE

The word frontier is not about to go away, for it will always hold a privileged place in the American cultural lexicon.

—John Mack Faragher

President Lyndon Johnson’s frontier myth was too shaken by the events of Vietnam for him to seek reelection. President George W. Bush’s conservative frontier mythology saw his popularity eventually to drop to even lower levels in 2008 than Johnson’s depths in 1968. By the time Bush 43 left office in 2009, the conservative movement that he had led was in a mess. The war in Iraq had become yet another painful quagmire; Afghanistan, meanwhile, had become a low-intensity slog against the al-Qaeda–backed Taliban, which had seemingly only deepened its resolve as it spread into Pakistan. General William Westmoreland had promised Americans that the war in Vietnam would be over by Christmas 1965. Emphasizing fiscal matters, VP Cheney had once similarly said that the Iraq conflict would cost Americans next to nothing. They were both wrong.

Many scholars, journalists, and diplomats have situated the Iraq War largely in the context of a conflict that was based in and predicated upon a fabricated lie. For Lyndon Baines Johnson, his Great Society at home was eclipsed by the half-fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident. For Bush, his administration’s false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been perceived as leading to long-term disaster in the Middle East.[1] Some analysts, especially on the left, have emphasized the corporate interests that America held toward a region rich in oil reserves.[2] Though these points are in many respects accurate and insightful, what these discussions fail to do is to provide answers to this question: How did Bush so successfully promote a war based on bad intelligence and false information about weapons of mass destruction and where corporate interests were so blatantly visible? The answer, as I hope I have demonstrated, lies largely in the ability of presidents to engage and deploy powerful frontier mythology. This mythology, however, is not ahistorical (as Turnerian scholars such as Ray Allen Billington and leftists such as Patricia Limerick might lead one to think). Rather, the myth shifts and adapts in the face of powerful historical events. For LBJ it was Vietnam and upheaval at home; for Carter, the economy and the seeming impotence and upheaval at home in the face of the hostage crisis in Iran. This created a hinge that shifted the frontier myth from one that was broad and capable of explaining the lived history and potential future of a broad range of Americans into a narrow and conservative one that disenfranchised black, Hispanic, gay, and liberal cowboys. But in an ironic twist of fate, the events of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 fiscal crisis shook the foundations of the conservative frontier structures and have created, it seems, an opportunity for future Democrats to reclaim Theodore Roosevelt’s domestic frontier mythology.

Americans have paid a terrible cost in lives and treasure in Iraq. At first, as with LBJ, the American media and public had mostly supported President Bush’s venture overseas—but as Bush’s credibility gap widened, the press and public turned against him just as it had against Johnson. The day after LBJ announced his decision not to run for reelection in 1968, he told the National Association of Broadcasters in Chicago that the media is highly selective in the stories it pursues. The media and especially TV, Johnson contended, prefers the spectacle of war in the stories it presents to the less visually compelling quest for peace. “Peace, in the news sense, is a ‘condition.’ War is an ‘event.’” The “event” LBJ had described, which helped destroy the liberal version of the frontier myth, is a potential threat to the conservative version too.[3]

Marshall Sahlins has challenged scholars to look not only at how events impact on structure—in this case, the structure of the frontier myth—but how structure shapes events. Both inform the other. George W. Bush attempted to deploy western symbolism in the aftermath of 9/11, most significantly through his invasion of Iraq: a country that as of this writing remains bitterly divided and in the grip of civil war as a direct result of Bush’s actions almost two decades ago.[4] Bush, like Reagan, wanted to restore the good old days through what he perceived as a return to simpler times of frontier justice. But when Bush’s responses to 9/11 and a failing economy proved inadequate to deal with the complex realities of the world in the twenty-first century, it became obvious to the majority of Americans that the kind of frontier symbolism and ethics he promoted did not match the historic experience. Bush’s empty boasts of “mission accomplished” in Iraq caused the optimism of the can-do frontier myth to once again be called seriously into question just as it had been for the liberal LBJ in the 1960s. The limits of American power have again become glaringly evident, and the nation’s sense of mission, or at least its ability to carry it out, viewed with increasing doubt. Domestically, the Bush Republicans’ insistence on rugged individualism through deregulation, a free-for-all bonanza economy, and get-the-government-off-our-backs tax cuts also came to be viewed with an increasingly skeptical eye as it appeared to many Americans in 2008 that these very policies caused the collapse of the nation’s financial system.

As we have observed since the early twentieth century, major events in US and world history have caused the emphasis of the frontier myth to be changed to varying degrees; simultaneously, presidents could attempt to marshal this symbolism in support of their wide-ranging ideologies and backgrounds. Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan appear to have had more success in these areas than did the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush. For all four presidents, though, the myth had a discursive power that both constrained and liberated actions by creating expectations among the American public of what frontier America should do and what it could do. Events and decisions that rendered earlier expressions of the myth less viable for Democrats in the late 1960s and 1970s would have a very similar impact on George W. Bush in the 2000s. During the presidency of Barack Obama (2009–17), it was still Republicans, not Democrats, who were much more prone to apply the frontier myth and to try to do so in the context of their one relatively recent presidential icon, Ronald Reagan, rather than through the much more maligned Bush. But the Republicans’ success in using this imagery appears to have been rendered largely impotent outside the reddest of states. Johnson’s and Bush’s own discourse and policy were partly responsible for the myth’s ultimate inability to provide solutions to both of them, but in a broader sense their downfall and the two periods of decline in the myth’s power have been a result of broader, changing historical events and circumstances as well.

COWBOY REAGAN, REPUBLICAN ICON

The popular image of Ronald Reagan has improved with time. During the late Bush Sr. and much of the Clinton years, Reagan was rated as an average president by the American public.[5] Though still unpopular with many Democrats and independents, as early as the 2004 campaign, Reagan had become the Republican gold standard for presidents and presidential candidates: a legacy tied inseparably with the conservative frontier myth.

After the Ride, a larger-than-life cowboy Reagan statue appearing at the entrance to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. A duplicate resides at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. (Sculptor: Glenna Goodacre, 1998; photograph by the author, 2011)

On June 14, 2004, just after Ronald Reagan’s death at the age of ninety-three, Time, Newsweek, and People magazines independently decided to run the exact same close-up photo of cowboy Reagan in his white Stetson and denim shirt on their front covers: the same image used in the America: Reagan Country campaign. For Republicans, Reagan and frontier conservatism went together like Roy Rogers and Trigger. Ronald Reagan, conservatism, and the frontier myth had become virtually synonymous.

By 2011, the year that would have marked Reagan’s one hundredth birthday, his iconic popularity among Republicans had reached a fever pitch. Just prior to Presidents’ Day, more Americans now rated Ronald Reagan as the country’s greatest president. In the Austin (TX) American-Statesman’s special “Centennial Tribute to Reagan’s Influence” edition, the editor exclaimed, “Ronald Reagan would have turned 100 this Sunday, and nearly seven years after his death, one might think he is still alive and leading the Republican Party. . . . Reagan’s near-idol status in the GOP is so ingrained that when potential party chairmen were asked last month to name their political hero, the moderator hastened to add ‘aside from President Reagan.’” Potential GOP presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gushed on the centenary that Reagan was “extraordinarily quotable and inspiring, as much as Lincoln and more than anyone else in the twentieth century.” As observed in earlier chapters, Reagan’s presidency followed the Vietnam experience, assassinations, the OPEC crisis, Watergate, stagflation, and humiliation in the Middle East. Americans wanted to believe in themselves and in a revised version of the frontier myth, which had allegedly made their country both great and exceptional. Former Clinton aide Paul Begala was less glowing on the revitalization of the former Republican president: “Reagan holds unique status today because the Republicans don’t have anyone else,” Begala contended. “They can’t lionize Eisenhower because, by today’s standards, he was a liberal. They can’t lionize Nixon because he was a criminal. Who have they got left? He was an extraordinary president but the right needed a hero, so they turned him into a hero.” The right needed a hero, but it was Reagan’s spin on the frontier myth that provided the structures upon which a hero could be made.[6]

THE FAR-RIGHT FRONTIER

For those on the right of the Republican Party, including a larger proportion of rural voters, the frontier myth was viewed as having become their domain under Reagan, not Bush—and in the 2000s when Reagan’s own positions seemed too conciliatory, both Reagan’s image and the myth underwent a shift even further to the right on the political spectrum. From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, ultraconservatives heavily invoked the myth’s ideals of individualism, self-reliance, and the like and attached these to Reagan as the symbol. In what Newsweek labeled “a right-wing panderfest,” the post-Bush political culture had become grimmer and even more extreme than the divisive milieu concocted by GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s and carried on through the Bush 43 years: giving rise to a Tea Party that shook up the Republican establishment and instilled a sentiment in American politics where “cooperation became a dirty word.” The frontier myth’s manifestations were almost exclusively employed by those on the political right as Reagan himself was appropriated by these conservative ideologues as being more to the right than he ever actually was.[7]

After Bush left office in 2008, collectivist readings of the American Constitution by Democrats collided increasingly with the individualist readings of those on the right: with the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) health-care program, the environment, gay rights, gun control, and Social Security. These divisions, combined with enduring troubles in the Middle East and a series of economic crises, have seemingly driven the wedge even further between two parts of the same citizenry who understand their country’s history and values differently. As has always been the case, events and forces often beyond control of the chief executives themselves have largely shaped the legacy of their administrations—and of the frontier myth upon which the four presidents explored in this study relied so heavily.

A CENTURY AFTER TR: PROGRESSIVISM AND THE FRONTIER MYTH

In his article “When the G.O.P. Was Green,” environmental historian William Cronon points out that Republican opposition to environmental protection is only a recent development. Until the 1980s the GOP could claim to have had an environmental record just as distinguished as that of the Democratic Party. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican himself, had launched conservation as the first national political movement. As Cronon stated, since cowboy Reagan, “The party has turned its back on a proud history. . . . [The] older, Republican tradition [honors] our heritage by preserving public lands, remembering the deep spiritual ties to the land that led the United States to be the first nation in the world to create wilderness parks—what actions could be more conservative than these?”[8] The hinge, which included the election of Reagan, changed all that.

Just as Republicans have been moving away from TR’s liberal brand of the frontier myth as an icon and guide for their party and ideology, Democratic president Obama invoked it on numerous occasions to promote both TR’s liberalism and the protection of society’s weak from the corruptions of corporate power. Perhaps the occasion that received the most attention was Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas (the home of TR’s New Nationalism), where Obama told his audience in 2011, “[Theodore] Roosevelt believed then what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for progress in human history. . . . But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can.” Obama then quoted from the first progressive president: “‘Our country,’ [TR] said, ‘means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy . . . of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.’” Press reaction to the speech on both sides of the political spectrum was immediate and polarized. New Jersey’s Star-Ledger offered up the view of many of Obama’s supporters: according to its editor, the current Republican Party’s “worship of the free market, its aversion to using an active government to remedy its excesses, would drive Roosevelt into the arms of the Democrat[ic] Party if he were alive today.” Some Republicans still winced at such descriptions, but others returned to their attacks on TR himself: a reflection of how much the political nature of the frontier myth has changed over the past century.[9]

Though not opposed to “putting on the hat”—as were some other presidents, such as JFK—Barack Obama rarely employed frontier imagery during his presidency. Here Senator Obama obliges the crowd at a presidential campaign rally in Austin. Did a Texan set him up with the black hat? (Photographer: Benjamin Sklar, February 23, 2007. © Getty Images)

Obama never wrapped himself in the mantle of the frontier myth—as TR, LBJ, Reagan, and Bush 43 did—but like most presidents since TR, Obama did not completely avoid its use either, having briefly invoked the myth on issues ranging from working together for the common good to wilderness preservation, the pursuit of modern frontiers in science and technology, and hope for the future. But while Obama engaged the frontier symbolism on occasion—putting it to some of the same uses as TR and LBJ—these were only passing references.[10] Barack Obama’s lack of inclination to invoke the frontier myth in a substantive way was not surprising in an era when the myth had become the appropriated property of the Republican Party.

Unfortunately for Obama, he was somewhat less successful in an era of political brinkmanship than TR was in his day, when the latter urged Americans to have empathy with people, including cowboys, from other walks of life and to transcend mutual interests in favor of the mutual good. The current state of the frontier myth is caught in a kind of conservative limbo as it was for liberals during another post–World War II period of economic uncertainty: the late 1960s and 1970s. Given the myth’s previous resilience, one can certainly envision that it might be called upon again in a major way by presidential contenders of the future: the shape of which is to be determined at least as much by events and forces beyond the candidates’ and presidents’ control, as by those who would deploy the symbolism and power of the myth themselves. And though the presidents and presidential candidate protagonists of the myth since Reagan have been conservatives, there is no reason why major events such as the Iraq War—and more recently the November 2016 election of the divisive billionaire Donald Trump to the presidency—could not cause a shift back to some of the original liberal uses of the frontier myth that began with Theodore Roosevelt.

THE HINGE AND BEYOND

From the late 1960s through 1980, a shift took place, the hinge from LBJ to Ronald Reagan. Within the parameters of American political culture, the Democratic president Johnson and Republican president Reagan came down at diametrically opposite poles—one called for more government intervention, the other called for much less, yet both relied heavily on the frontier myth for success. Turner argued that the greatest products of the frontier—tolerance, diversity, and politically democratic communities on the one hand, and the construction of the libertarian individual on the other—are in ongoing conflict with one another. Johnson’s platform of 1964 chose to emphasize tolerance and a national agenda based on equality as opposed to regional policies and values; Reagan in 1980 then moved the emphasis to the other side of the spectrum and toward the kind of libertarian individualism and states’ rights perspectives that Barry Goldwater had previously envisioned but had pursued with much less success. LBJ, like TR, projected frontier imagery forward in time to a progressive future, while Reagan projected it backward and looked to a nostalgic past. A dichotomy developed here, and with it the discourse and the myth, or at very least its emphasis, shifted and changed. By the 1980 presidential campaign, national politics in the United States was well on its way to becoming a narrower, less inclusive, conservative voice. President Johnson’s attempts to bring the full liberal frontier myth to fruition had sputtered, then collapsed; the western myth receded into the background in the 1970s; and by the time Reagan had entered the White House in 1981, a reactionary, nostalgic way of understanding America had replaced the more future-oriented, progressive vision. Reagan’s frontier America was a reasserted structure that looked back in time, and contended that the myth had been reinvigorated by returning to what it originally was, or was supposed to have been. Reagan’s emergence as a presidential icon can best be understood not simply as a resurgence of American conservatism—the usual explanation provided by scholars—but as this study has demonstrated, in the context of a restructured and redirected version of the frontier myth in response to domestic and international events including the quagmire in Vietnam, race riots, a weak economy, and the Iran hostage crisis.

In recent years, the popular idea that frontier American leaders and politicians are naturally Republicans with conservative ideals flows directly from the Reagan era. The watershed events of the mid-1960s through the late 1970s broke up the consensus of a liberal, progressive frontier myth that no longer appeared to match the historic experience: the very same process that Sahlins articulated. Instead, the liberal frontier model was replaced with a conservative version and its combination of nostalgia, a sense of American exceptionalism, exclusion of non–bona fide Americans (minorities, the poor, and intellectuals), and both optimism and resentment. In the twenty-first century, however, the conservative frontier myth lost a significant degree of its power and acceptance during the George W. Bush presidency. The seemingly endless Iraq War, slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and faltering economy were some of the events that hastened this decline. For millions, the Bush-era version of the frontier experience as it applied to government policy came to be seen as out of step with the world. For some nonconservatives, Bush 43’s approach amounted to a betrayal of the earlier frontier mythology of liberal cowboy presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Related to this negative response to Bush from those on the left and many in the center, twenty-first-century Republicans have had a kind of schizophrenic response to Theodore Roosevelt. The conservative National Review continued to praise TR in 2000 for his “robust interventionism and unstinting defense of American patriotism and self-government” but remained clearly wary of Roosevelt on other issues. “TR’s progressivism,” its editors complained, had a “direct line” to regulation, modern liberalism, and “big, intrusive government.” Roosevelt’s advocacy of a graduated income tax and tendency to equate great wealth with “selfishness” also bothered the National Review, which concluded that what America now needs is not a TR “but a McKinley, someone with the sense to stand back . . . and let the creativity and imagination of Americans do its work.” Eight years later, when self-described “maverick” senator John McCain of Arizona became the GOP presidential candidate and frequently likened himself to America’s first frontier president, the National Review would have none of it. The suspicious Michael Knox Beran complained,

It’s one thing for a conservative to admire T.R.’s style and gallantry, the charge up San Juan Hill, rounding up of crooks in the Badlands. It’s something else for a conservative to identify Roosevelt as a fellow reformer, as Sen. McCain did. . . . Far from allying conservative fears of a man who, largely for reasons of expediency, embraced a host of dubious reforms, and who ended his career by embracing the Progressive dream of a state strong enough to command the industry and commerce of a nation . . . All in all John McCain would do better to talk more about Ronald Reagan and less about Theodore Roosevelt.[11]

To be certain, Roosevelt’s presidency framed questions that Americans still ask today: How much influence should the federal government have over the US economy? What needs to be done to protect the environment for future generations? How much military and economic power should the United States exert globally? Specific aspects of TR’s presidential and Bull Moose agendas were raised regularly during the Obama presidency. On March 8, 2010, while promoting the health-care bill that would ultimately be signed into law two weeks later, Obama invoked his Republican predecessor TR by prompting Americans, “Think about it. We’ve been talking about health care for nearly a century. I’m reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right now. He was talking about it. Teddy Roosevelt.”[12]

Since 2017 the highly divisive presidency of Donald J. Trump—with its grievance-based ideology, toxic masculinity, corporate tax cuts, environment-busting, America-first approach to trade and foreign relations, us-versus-them rhetoric, hostility toward immigration, alternative facts, and challenges to the nature of American democracy and the executive branch—has been the story of a polarization that has increased over time. Trump’s borrowing of cowboy Reagan’s slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again,” dropped the “Let’s,” and as historian Michael Kazin wrote, Trump’s version “might well have been ‘Make America Hate Again.’”[13] While no love is lost between the current GOP president and George W. Bush (his father even voted for Hillary Clinton), several of Dubya’s own policies—including his tax cuts for the wealthy, go-it-alone style of foreign policy, and undermining of the Environmental Protection Agency’s work to combat climate change—helped set the stage for Trump. Two major differences with George W. Bush, however, have been Donald Trump’s intentional effort to divide Americans based on race, religion, and sexual identity at home, and a transactional, America-first approach to foreign policy, as opposed to an emphasis on the frontier concept of American exceptionalism and its accompanying sense of mission. Significantly, frontier rhetoric has been deployed much more sparingly by Trump than any of his Republican predecessors since 1980. The one major exception has been in relation to the president’s creation of a sixth branch of the US military—the “Space Force.” In a statement sounding like LBJ or Reagan, Trump declared, “Once more we will summon the great American spirit to tame the next great American frontier. . . . We must have American dominance in space.”[14] To the chagrin of some Star Trek fans, Donald Trump’s handpicked logo for the Space Force looks almost identical to the boldly go “Starfleet Command” logo used by the Star Trek franchise.[15]

THE FUTURE OF THE FRONTIER MYTH IN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

The frontier myth is resilient. It has been embraced in politics for more than a century as a comforting narrative of American society and purpose. Most significantly, my study finds that this set of ideas in American mythology has held tremendous power at the level of presidential politics. Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Reagan, Bush 43, and to varying degrees presidents with noncowboy identities have tapped into the frontier of the imagination for more than a century—with its limitless possibilities, claims of a unique relationship between Americans and the natural world, and ideas about the expansion of American values in faraway places, the exceptionalism of the American character and its institutions, the struggle of civilization versus savagery, and the promise of a bonanza just over the horizon. Liberal and conservative presidents have engaged the tensions inherent within the changing frontier myth across a broad spectrum: the pull between old and new, between nostalgia and progress; and the demands for individualism versus needs of the community and of tolerance and inclusiveness. All of these tropes, whether conservative or liberal in their emphasis, served to strengthen the hopes of presidents and presidential campaigns by situating them and their policies in the same company as the nation’s heroic pioneers and its great mission.

Also of significance is the often black-and-white nature of the frontier myth. This feature, which played a key role in stoking LBJ’s anti-Communist fight to save the “little boogers” of South Vietnam and motivating Reagan’s initial campaign against the Soviet’s “evil empire,” was later reshaped and redeployed against Al Qaeda and their accomplices in support of Bush’s war on terror. US troops, like the cavalry of old, were once again needed to defend from evildoers—who sought to destroy all the nation allegedly stood for at home and globally—innocents’ physical safety and the American values of freedom, individualism, and self-determination. The differing contexts for this black hat–white hat dichotomy demonstrate, once again, the malleability and complexity of the myth itself.

Careful and thorough attempts to debunk the frontier myth have been with us since the days of Charles Beard in the 1920s and Earl Pomeroy in the 1950s but have been limited in their influence on the general public and on most American presidents. Perhaps this is in part because, as David H. Murdoch contended, “the ultimate defence of all myth is to argue that it is true—if not literally, then in some transcendental sense.”[16] The myth of the frontier experience remains the most powerful set of American ideas to emerge since the Civil War that directly engages with the nation’s society and character. And the western genre has undergone dramatic changes in its emphasis and style over the last century. But the frontier symbolism and western story continue to hold a special appeal to many Americans who, in our post-postmodern world still want to experience it through popular and, as this study demonstrates, political culture. The power of ideas to shape policy is of great relevance to our understanding of the role of the frontier myth in presidential politics, policy, and personas since the beginning of the twentieth century. So pervasive are those ideas that frontier themes have the potential to remain influential in American politics and culture a century from now.

Looking forward, the nature of the frontier myth’s message in the realm of presidential politics depends on the shape and influence of national and world events that will occur in the years and decades to come. Myths are unpredictable and do not stay static for all time. Even with the most powerful myths, some features endure, others do not, and major events can cause myths to dramatically change their nature or trajectory. Just as the changing nature of the myth allowed conservative presidents Reagan and Bush 43 to capture the symbolism of the frontier myth from liberal presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, another shakeup in the contours and emphasis myth could someday swing perceived ownership of the myth back to those on the left of the political spectrum.

The frontier myth helped to sow the seeds of today’s angry polarization, but as during the hinge of the 1970s, the myth itself has currently gone into a state of recession. As debates intensify to a fever pitch during the Trump presidency over the nature of US foreign policy, climate change, gun violence, terrorism, immigration, the government’s role in the economy, presidential power, the nature of democracy, and response to a pandemic, the frontier myth could once again be entering a watershed period.

The myth has often played a significant role in putting the majority of Americans on the same page, as during the early Cold War, but at the other extreme has contributed to a left-right division and an intensification in the polarization of American politics—as has been the case in recent years. In the end, the events that are largely outside the American commander in chief’s control may prove most crucial in determining the nature, shape, and acceptability of the frontier myth in American culture, along with its role in presidential politics in the decades to come. That the myth has endured to this day, more than a century after the first frontier president left office, is a testament to its ability to adapt and change while holding a constant grip on the American imagination.

NOTES

Abbreviations

9/11

September 11, 2001

APP

American Presidency Project

Bush 43

George W. Bush

FDR

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

GOP

Republican Party (Grand Old Party)

LBJ

Lyndon Baines Johnson

LBJPL

Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library

NYT

New York Times

RFK

Robert F. Kennedy

RRPL

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

SDI

Strategic Defense Initiative

TR

Theodore Roosevelt

WP

Washington Post

Introduction

1. Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1894), 200.

2. Ibid.

3. Reviewers of Turner’s thesis (including historian Carl Becker) and its commercial promoters quoted these eighty-six words of Turner’s thesis much more than any other segment. See Ronald H. Carpenter, “Frederick Jackson Turner and the Rhetorical Impact of the Frontier Thesis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (April 1977): 123.

4. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 226–27.

5. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 18.

6. Ibid., 19.

7. Janice Hocker Rushing, “The Rhetoric of the Western Myth,” Communication Monographs 50, no. 1 (March 1983): 15n6.

8. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 13; and see “Myths-Dreams-Symbols” quotations from The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers at http://mythsdreamssymbols.com/functionsofmyth.xhtml (accessed April 27, 2016).

9. Walter P. Webb (and others) alternatively saw the West as a distinct geographic region defined by aridity and replete with heroes overcoming environmental obstacles. As vice president, LBJ appointed Webb as the historian of the land beyond the ninety-eighth meridian.

10. Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 14; see also G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 1.

11. Martin Ridge, “The Life of an Idea: The Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 41, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 12.

12. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 201.

13. Charles A. Beard quoted in Richard Hofstadter, “Turner and the Frontier Myth,” The American Scholar 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1949): 433.

14. In late-nineteenth-century Texas, the estimated figure of black and Hispanic cowboys is 37 percent. See Sara R. Massey, Black Cowboys of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), xiii.

15. The most compelling (and original) historical critique of the Turner thesis is Earl H. Pomeroy, “Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41, no. 4 (March 1955): 579–600. The best synthesis of the New West historians’ interpretation of western history, which turned much of Turner’s and Roosevelt’s frontier arguments on their heads, is Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). And historian Gerald D. Nash argues that the impetus for Turner’s thesis in 1893—that the frontier was “closed”—is false in and of itself. See Gerald D. Nash, “The Census of 1890 and the Closing of the Frontier,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 71, no. 3 (July 1980): 98–100.

16. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Athenaeum, 1992), 30.

17. Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 31.

18. Elliott West, “Selling the Myth: Western Images in Advertising,” Montana 46, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 40.

19. Jenni Calder, There Must Be a Lone Ranger (New York: Taplinger, 1974), 205–6.

20. This point is developed in Arthur Redding, “Frontier Mythologies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford,” Literature Film Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2007): 315.

21. Ray Allen Billington, “Frederick Jackson Turner: Non-Western Historian,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 59 (1971): 185–86, quoted in Carpenter, “Frederick Jackson Turner,” 124.

22. Rush Welter, “The Idea of Progress in America” (1955), in C. K. McFarland, ed., Readings in Intellectual History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 284–94; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

23. Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1982). Dippie’s insightful cultural history demonstrates how the belief in the inevitable disappearance of Native Americans in the face of advancing American society and modernity was actually a myth, but so powerful a myth that it actually caused American politicians and policy administrators to create and implement policies from the late eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries that took the “vanishing American” as a fact. This book’s historiographical approach is based largely on Dippie’s work.

24. Welter, “The Idea of Progress in America,” 288.

25. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 153.

26. Keith T. Carlson in email correspondence with the author, October 11, 2012.

27. John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1994), 1.

28. Historian Robert A. Goldberg recently acknowledged LBJ’s westernness, but then quickly dismissed its political potency for the Democratic president. Goldberg writes that Johnson’s 1964 campaign opponent, the archconservative Barry Goldwater, “trumped LBJ” in his deployment of the frontier myth, “for the president’s liberal rhetoric and position as a Washington insider compromised his Western persona.” This book’s findings would suggest otherwise. See Robert A. Goldberg, “The Western Hero in Politics: Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Rise of the American Conservative Movement,” in Jeff Roche, ed., The Political Culture of the New West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 29. Three popular examples of the exclusive attachment of cowboys and the frontier to conservatives include James Gerstenzang, “That Retro Feel to Bush’s Style: It’s Reaganesque,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2003; Michael Allen and Romesh Ratnesar, “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy,” Time (Canadian edition), July 17, 2006, 12–17; and “Reagan: An American Icon,” USA Today Special Centennial Edition, February 2011.

Chapter 1

1. “Immense Throng Hears Labor Day Address,” Fargo (ND) Forum and Daily Republican, September 5, 1910. Today this quote or some variation of it appears in numerous North Dakota tourist brochures, and on signs at national parks, shopping malls, and paintball fields.”

2. Nickname bestowed upon Roosevelt and the title of Edmund Morris’s biography, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2002).

3. TR correspondence to Lodge quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), 283; Richard C. Rattenbury, Hunting the American West: The Pursuit of Big Game for Life, Profit, and Sport, 1800–1900 (Missoula, MT: Boone and Crockett Club, 2008), 333.

4. Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail (New York: The Century Company, 1888), 97, 102–4, 114–29.

5. John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 30; see Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Hunter (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), xv.

6. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Round Up,” Century Illustrated Magazine 35 (1888): 855.

7. See Paul M. Rego, American Ideal: Theodore Roosevelt’s Search for American Individualism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 60, 61; description of Roosevelt’s role in the Stockmen’s Association described in ibid., 52.

8. “Roosevelt Speaks at Cheyenne on Western Frontier Life,” Wall Street Journal, August 29, 1910.

9. Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 474; TR quote and quotation from Forrest G. Robinson, “The Roosevelt-Wister Connection: Some Notes on the West and the Uses of History,” Western American Literature 14, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 103; Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889–1896), 3:iii, quoted in Robinson, “The Roosevelt-Wister Connection,” 105.

10. TR quoted in Robinson, “The Roosevelt-Wister Connection,” 103; TR, Winning of the West, 3:iii. TR discusses his ideas about a melting pot in Leroy G. Dorsey and Rachel M. Harlow, “‘We Want Americans Pure and Simple’: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 58, 62, 73, 74; Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 201.

11. TR correspondence to Frederick Jackson Turner, February 10, 1894, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951–54): 1:363; Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: Harper, 2009), 241.

12. See especially Richard Slotkin, “The American West, as Seen by Europeans and Americans,” European Contributions to American Studies 16 (March 1989): 67–68.

13. Early works about Roosevelt that engage this subject include Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Badlands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), v; William Roscoe Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 56–58; and Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 8. Two more recent accounts that explore some aspects of the influence of TR’s life out west on his own ideas and actions are Michael L. Collins, That Damned Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and the American West, 1883–1898 (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), and Roger L. DiSilvestro, Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician’s Quest for Recovery in the American West (New York: Walker and Co., 2010), 170–71, 252–53.

14. “Roosevelt, the Typical American,” Zion’s Herald, September 11, 1895, 579.

15. “Bugaboos” quote from Kathleen Dalton, “Why America Loved Teddy Roosevelt, or Charisma Is in the Eyes of the Beholders,” in Robert J. Brugger, ed., Our Selves/Our Past: Psychological Approaches to American History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 275; TR delivered the first of his “Gospel of Strenuosity” speeches to the Hamilton Club in Chicago on April 10, 1899. The complete address was published in Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century Co., 1903).

16. Though the sinking of the Maine was mysterious at the time and blamed on the Spanish by the American press, it is now generally agreed that it was the result of an internal explosion.

17. Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 33–35.

18. Collins, That Damned Cowboy, 150.

19. Ronald B. Tobias, Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 54; Clifford P. Westermeir, Who Rush to Glory: The Cowboy Volunteers of 1898 (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1958), 34, quoted in Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 614.

20. Gary Gerstle, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1290.

21. B. Byron Price, “Cowboys and Presidents,” Convergence: Autry National Center Magazine (Spring–Summer 2008): 19; Mark Hanna, quoted in Tobias, Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature, 61.

22. TR correspondence to the editor of Century, Richard W. Gilder, quoted in David H. Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001), 69.

23. TR to Wister, May 29, 1902, Owen Wister Papers, Container 33, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

24. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking, 1966), 225.

25. The Virginian went through sixteen printings and sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year. More than two million hardcover copies had been sold by 1990, and there is no record of paperback sales. The book was the basis of five feature films and the 1960s TV series starring James Drury and Doug McClure. As the editors of the Time-Life series on the Old West put it, “The Virginian was the archetype that fixed the myth of the West” (Robert Shulman, introduction to Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], vii). Also see Jane Kuenz, “The Cowboy Businessman and ‘The Course of Empire’: Owen Wister’s The Virginian,” Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001): 120.

26. For The Virginian’s enthusiastic reception among students in contemporary times, see Stanley Corkin, “Cowboys and Free Markets: Post–World War II Westerns and U.S. Hegemony,” Cinema Journal 39, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 66–67.

27. TR, Address at Colorado Springs, August 2, 1901, in American Ideals, vol. 13, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 453–54; ibid., 456–58.

28. John Morton Blum, The Progressive Presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (New York: Norton, 1980), 26.

29. TR, An Autobiography (1913), in vol. 20 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 95, quoted in Rego, American Ideal, 57.

30. Duane G. Jundt, “‘Never Draw Unless You Mean to Shoot’: Theodore Roosevelt’s Frontier Diplomacy,” Faculty Publications [Northwestern College] 5, no. 6 (December 2012): 15.

31. TR, The Winning of the West, 5:229–30, quoted in Richard Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress: Theodore Roosevelt’s Myth of the Frontier,” American Quarterly 33, no. 5 (Winter 1981): 629.

32. H. W. Brands, “Theodore Roosevelt: America’s First Strategic Thinker,” in William N. Tilchin and Charles E. Neu, eds., Artists of Power: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Their Enduring Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 38.

33. TR, The Strenuous Life, 9.

34. TR to Cecil Spring Rice, correspondence of December 27, 1904, in Morison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 4:1082–88, quoted in Brands, “Theodore Roosevelt,” 41.

35. Jean M. Yarborough, “Theodore Roosevelt: Progressive Crusader,” Heritage.org, Makers of American Political Thought Series 3, September 24, 2012, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/09/theodore-roosevelt-progressive-crusader.

36. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, The Pioneer Gateway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 170, quoted in Michael T. Brown, “Imagining Wilderness, Constructing Landscapes: The Value of Vision in the American West and Tropics, 1821–1914” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2009), 282; Brown, Imagining Wilderness, 283.

37. TR, “The Pioneer Spirit and American Problems,” in Hermann Hagedorn, ed., The Works of Theodore Roosevelt: Memorial Edition (New York: Scribner’s, 1923–26), 23.

38. Ibid., 22.

39. Franklin K. Lane quoted in Juliet James, Palaces and Courts of the Exposition (San Francisco: California Book Company, 1915), 120, in Elizabeth N. Armstrong, “Hercules and the Muses: Public Art at the Fair,” in Burton Benedict, ed., The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exhibition of 1915 (Berkeley, CA: Lowie Museum of Anthropology, 1983), 122.

40. Brown, Imagining Wilderness, 302.

41. Norman A. Graebner, “Manifest Destiny,” in Bruce W. Jentleson and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3:106, quoted in Serge Ricard, “The Roosevelt Corollary,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 2006): 25.

42. Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 527. Elsewhere, Bailey charged TR with “almost pathological bellicosity.” See Thomas A. Bailey, Presidential Greatness: The Image and the Man from George Washington to the Present (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966), 307. For the classic warlike depiction of TR as president, also see Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography (1931; New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1956).

43. See Brands, “Theodore Roosevelt,” 33–44.

44. Ibid., 38.

45. Stephen Wertheim, “Reluctant Liberator: Theodore Roosevelt’s Philosophy of Self-Government and Preparation for Philippine Independence,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 39, no. 3 (September 2009): 507.

46. TR to Kermit Roosevelt, correspondence of August 25, 1905, in Morison, Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 4:1316–17.

47. Patricia Limerick, “The Forest Reserves and the Argument for a Closing Frontier,” in The Origins of the National Forests (Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1992), 13.

48. Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior, 243.

49. Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Vintage Books, 2002); and Elliott West, “Roosevelt’s West,” Keynote Address at the Theodore Roosevelt Symposium 2011, October 27, 2011, Dickinson State University, Dickinson, North Dakota, http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Get-Involved/Events/2011-Theodore-Roosevelt-Symposium.aspx.

50. Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 67.

51. TR to James Brander Matthews, July 20, 1907, in Morison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 5:723, quoted in ibid.

52. See Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, 522.

53. TR, draft of statement accepting vice presidential nomination, September 15, 1900, in Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Library of Congress, quoted in Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 83.

54. TR to James Adger Smyth, November 26, 1902, in Morison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 3:384.

55. John A. Gable, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, NY: National University Publications/Kennikat Press, 1978), 61, quoted in Max J. Skidmore, “Theodore Roosevelt on Race and Gender,” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 2 (1998): 42.

56. Madison Grant memorandum to TR, October 15, 1918, in the Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC, Series 1, October 9–15, 1918, Shelf No. 13,869, Reel 295.

57. TR correspondence to Madison Grant, December 30, 1918, reprinted in Morison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8:1419.

58. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 86.

59. Ibid., 133.

60. Arnaldo Testi, “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Masculinity,” Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (March 1995): 1530.

61. Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 99.

62. TR, “The Practicability of Equalizing Men and Women before the Law,” unpublished essay, 1880, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, quoted in ibid., 100.

63. TR, Winning of the West, 8:140.

64. Leroy Dorsey, “Managing Women’s Equality: Theodore Roosevelt, the Frontier Myth, and the Modern Woman,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 437.

65. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 141.

66. TR, “Sixth Annual Message,” December 3, 1906, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/206216.

67. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest Edition, 1988), 46, 50.

68. TR, The Strenuous Life, quoted in Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 150.

69. See ibid.

70. “Theodore Roosevelt and Conservation,” Theodore Roosevelt National Park, National Park Service, November 16, 2017, https://www.nps.gov/thro/learn/historyculture/theodore-roosevelt-and-conservation.xhtml.

71. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1993), 76, quoted in Brown, Imagining Wilderness, 11.

72. TR, “First Annual Message,” December 3, 1901, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/206187.

73. Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior, 677.

74. Business interests’ question paraphrased by Brinkley in ibid., 678.

75. TR, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 419–20, quoted in ibid, 679.

76. TR, “Special Message,” January 22, 1909, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/206718.

77. Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, directed by Edwin S. Porter (New York: Edison Manufacturing Company, 1901).

78. William Henry Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (1961; Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1975), 208, quoted in James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), 78.

79. See Natalie A. Naylor, Douglas Brinkley, and John Allen Gable, Theodore Roosevelt: Many-Sided American (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes Publishing, 1992), 501.

80. TR, speech of October 21, 1907, in William Griffith, ed., The Roosevelt Policy: Speeches, Letters, and State Papers, vol. 2 (New York: Current Literature Publishing Co., 1919), 634, quoted in Burns and Dunn, The Three Roosevelts, 95.

81. See Burns and Dunn, The Three Roosevelts, 95–96.

82. TR quoted in Michael Beschloss, “When T.R. Saw Lincoln,” NYT, May 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/upshot/when-tr-saw-lincoln.xhtml; TR, “The New Nationalism: Speech at Osawatomie,” August 31, 1910; TR’s quotation of Abraham Lincoln in William E. Leuchtenburg, ed., Theodore Roosevelt: The New Nationalism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 24.

83. TR, “The New Nationalism,” 32–33. For descriptions of the crowd and its response, see footnotes in ibid., 21–22.

84. Ibid., 35.

85. TR, The Winning of the West II, Vol. 9, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 12–13, quoted in Rego, American Ideal, 89.

86. Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 81–83, quoted in Max J. Skidmore, “Presidents and the Development of Medicare in the United States,” White House Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 28.

87. “Messages of Sympathy to Colonel Roosevelt,” Baltimore Sun, October 17, 1912; Independent-Record (Helena, MT), October 17, 1912; Ted P. Yeatman, Frank and Jesse James: The Story behind the Legend (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2003), 449n47.

88. William Allen White, speech at the College of Emporia, Emporia, KS, October 27, 1926, in Roosevelt clippings, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, quoted in Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, 653n20; Bob Herbert, “A World of Difference,” NYT, August 19, 2008.

89. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 23–24, quoted in Burns and Dunn, The Three Roosevelts, 131.

Chapter 2

Epigraph: LBJ, “Remarks at a ‘Salute to President Johnson’ Dinner in Cleveland,” October 8, 1964, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/242428.

1. William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

2. Nina I. Alexiev, “I Didn’t Want My Children to Grow Up in Soviet Russia,” Reader’s Digest, June 1947, 15.

3. David A. Smith, “American Nightmare: Images of Brainwashing, Thought Control, and Terror in Soviet Russia,” Journal of American Culture 33, no. 3 (2010): 220.

4. “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Reader’s Digest, September 1949, quoted in George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 156.

5. J. Fred MacDonald, “Made for TV Westerns: The First Generation,” in Who Shot the Sheriff?, https://www.jfredmacdonald.com/wsts/firstgeneration.xhtml (accessed June 14, 2020).

6. Nielsen US television ratings for January 1959: 1. Gunsmoke; 2. Have Gun—Will Travel; 3. The Rifleman; 4. Wagon Train; 5. The Danny Thomas Show (comedy); 6. The Real McCoys (comedy); 7. Tales of Wells Fargo; 8. Maverick; 9. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp; and 10. Zane Grey Theater (see MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace, 139).

7. Some sentences in this paragraph appear in slightly different form in Smith, “American Nightmare,” 225.

8. John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, memorial ed. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964), 101–20, 121–40; Price, “Cowboys and Presidents,” 41.

9. John F. Kennedy, “Address of Senator John F. Kennedy Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States—Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles,” July 15, 1960, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/274679.

10. See Roderick P. Hart, The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 90.

11. Alfred Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy: A Close-Up of the President from Texas (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 21; LBJ, “The President’s News Conference at the LBJ Ranch,” August 27, 1966, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238904.

12. LBJ’s description of TR in Ronnie Dugger interviews with LBJ, December 13–16, 1967, quoted in Ronnie Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 133; Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976; New York: Easton Press, 1987), 35; “Sparks flew” description found in Transcript, Gerald W. Siegel Oral Interview II, June 9, 1969, by T. H. Baker, LBJPL, AC 79-19, 6.

13. LBJPL, Pre-Presidential Memos, Box 6, quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 272.

14. LBJ’s membership switch is discussed in Stanley Walker, “Is Texas ‘South,’ ‘West,’ Both or More?” NYT Magazine, April 12, 1959, 35–36, in LBJPL, Reference Files; for additional details on LBJ’s voting record, see Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1964 (New York: Athenaeum, 1965), 252–53; Roscoe Drummond, “Will Johnson Be the Nominee?” Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch, August 31, 1957.

15. See, for example, LBJ, “Cattle Industry Needs Greater Public Understanding,” The Cattleman, May 1957, 29, 97–98; William H. Jordan interview, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Oral History Project, December 5, 1974, 12.

16. Stewart Alsop, “Lyndon Johnson: How Does He Do It?,” Saturday Evening Post, January 24, 1959, 38.

17. Transcript, Gerald W. Siegel Oral Interview I, May 26, 1969, by T. H. Baker, LBJPL, AC 77-17, 36; Transcript, Gerald W. Siegel Oral Interview II, June 9, 1969, by T. H. Baker, LBJPL, AC 79-19, 6.

18. “Yippee-i-o Ker-plunk,” Newsweek, February 15, 1960, 26; John R. Fischetti, Newspaper Enterprise Association, Chicago Daily News, c. 1960 (exact date unknown), LBJPL, Special Files: Cartoon Collection, Box 1, File 1, “Political Issues 1956–1964”; Jackson (MS) Daily News is quoted in Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South, 274–75.

19. For a summary of southern editorial attacks on LBJ, see James Jackson Kilpatrick, “Lyndon Johnson: Counterfeit Confederate,” Human Events 17, no. 34 (August 25, 1960): 373. Trouble on the “turncoat” issue persisted for years to come. See, especially, Jack Bell, “Some Old Johnson Friends to Be Missing at Convention,” Sunday Star—Washington DC, August 24, 1964. LBJ’s “moving to the left” quote appears in Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 3: Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 1004.

20. LBJ’s comments to Pierre Salinger in David Halberstam, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1969), 25, quoted in Dugger, The Politician, 140, and in Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy, 535.

21. Elizabeth Rowe interview, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Oral History Project, June 6, 1975, 15–16.

22. Ronnie Dugger, “President Johnson’s Frontiers,” Texas Observer, November 29, 1963, 8–9; Tom Wicker, “With Johnson on the Ranch,” NYT, January 5, 1964; Jim Bishop, “A Stay at the Ranch Begins with a Whoop,” WP, June 24, 1967.

23. “Lyndon B. Johnson: A Reference Resource,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, Presidential Oral History Project, http://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/essays/biography/2 (accessed November 8, 2011).

24. Bill Davidson, “Texas Political Powerhouse: Lyndon Johnson,” Look, August 4, 1959.

25. Hal K. Rothman, LBJ’s Texas White House: “Our Heart’s Home” (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 86; Craig Goldwin, “In 1963, a First State Dinner for the Record Books,” November 24, 2009, http.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi, copy in Reference files, Barbeque file, LBJPL.

26. Marshall Frady, “Cooling Off with LBJ,” Harper’s, June 1969, 69.

27. Dugger, The Politician, 358–59; LBJ, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 4, 1965, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241819.

28. The Hill Country: Lyndon Johnson’s Texas, NBC-TV Special, first aired May 9, 1966.

29. Sunday Times quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast: American Society since 1945 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 138.

30. Correspondence from Bess Abell (Lady Bird Johnson’s social secretary) to Mrs. Eleanor C. Brooks, Weymouth, Massachusetts, December 10, 1965, LBJPL, White House Social Files, LBJ Ranch—B; correspondence from Bess Abell to Mrs. S. P. Hitchings, Belleview, Missouri, April 6, 1965, LBJPL, Reference Files, Barbeque File; correspondence from Bess Abell to Mrs. Rose O. McIntyre, Westwood, Massachusetts, April 14, 1965, LBJPL, White House Social Files, Alpha File, Box 1345, LBJ Ranch Barbeque (Only); correspondence from Bess Abell to Mrs. John A. Odell, Pittsburgh, June 2, 1965, in ibid.; correspondence from Bess Abell to Mr. C. Lynn, Long Beach, California, January 28, 1965, in ibid.

31. Interview with Richard S. “Cactus” Pryor, September 10, 1968, 8a–12, 20, 22, LBJPL, University of Texas Oral History Project, AC 69–72; Dugger, The Politician, 144; “Diplomatic Staffers,” Newsweek, January 6, 1964, quoted in Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 4: The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2012), 510; Susan Black and Brendan Gill, “The Talk of the Town: Barbeque” [Abstract], New Yorker, August 29, 1964, 22. For another description of VP LBJ’s cowboy activities at the ranch for thirty UN delegates, see Marie Smith, “LBJ Ranch Set to Welcome the World,” WP, April 27, 1963.

32. Interview with Pryor, 22–25; Rothman, LBJ’s Texas White House, 167.

33. Bob Brister, “LBJ: Outdoor Sportsman,” Argosy, October 1964, 39–40, 86–88; George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir (New York: Andrews and McMeel, 1982), 154.

34. Winzola McLendon, “LBJ’s Tall in the Saddle.” WP, July 20, 1964.

35. John C. Hammerback, “Barry Goldwater’s Rhetoric of Rugged Individualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 2 (April 1972): 178, 179, 179.

36. Goldberg, “The Western Hero in Politics,” 29, 21.

37. Ibid., 30.

38. Characterization of Goldwater by the DNC and Barry Goldwater, Why Not Victory?, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), quoted in Correction Please! [Democratic National Committee Campaign Bulletin, Washington, DC], October 14, 1964, 1, 6, Democratic National Committee Collection, Series 1, Box 20, LBJPL.

39. “JV Memo on the Campaign,” from Jack Valenti to LBJ, September 7, 1964, LBJPL, Public Relations 16 Collection, Box 345, 9/1/64–9/30/64; “Memorandum to the President Re: Weekend Summary of Regional Organizational Meetings,” from Lawrence F. O’Brien to LBJ, October 4, 1964, 5–6, ibid., 10/1/64–10/28/64.

40. LBJ, “Remarks at the State Building in Reno,” October 12, 1964, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/242355; One Nation, One People: Democratic Platform, 1964, 16 (LBJ’s personal copy in the LBJPL, Democratic National Committee Files, Series 1, Box 173, President Johnson: Democratic National Convention Platform ’64—File).

41. Press Release, “Remarks by Rep. Carl Albert on the Platform,” August 25, 1964, 1, LBJPL, Democratic National Committee Files, Series 1, Box 173, President Johnson, Convention Platform File; Why Rural America Needs Johnson-Humphrey (pamphlet), LBJPL, Democratic National Committee Files, Series 1, Box 175, President Johnson, Campaign ’64: Official Campaign Slogans, Songs, Materials, Etc. file.

42. McLendon, “LBJ’s Tall in the Saddle.”

43. LBJ, “Remarks on Conservation at a Breakfast in Portland Saluting the Northwest-Southwest Power Transmission Intertie,” September 17, 1964, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241492.

44. Gerald D. Nash, The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), 6.

45. Ross R. Rice, “The 1964 Elections in the West,” Western Political Quarterly 18, no. 2 (June 1965): 433.

46. LBJ, “Remarks at the University of Michigan Online,” May 22, 1964, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/239689; George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, vol. 3: 1959–1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 1222.

47. LBJ, foreword in Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1935; Austin: University of Texas, 1965), ix–xi.

48. Transcription of Lyndon Baines Johnson: 36th President, film shown to visitors to the LBJPL in October 2011; Joseph Califano Jr., The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 11, 338–39, 151–52.

49. LBJ, “Remarks at a Fundraising Dinner in New Orleans,” October 9, 1964, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/242405.

50. One speech that contained virtually all of these elements is LBJ, “Remarks at the Dedication of Central Texas College, Killeen, Texas,” December 12, 1967, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238029.

51. LBJ, “Special Message to Congress: The American Promise,” March 15, 1965, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/242211.

52. Ibid; White, The Making of the President 1964, 376; Hugh Sidey, “Deep Grow the Roots of the Alamo,” Life, May 31, 1968, 32B.

53. Larry Levinson to Charles Maguire (letter), June 12, 1986, Reference File, Gun Control, LBJPL; Joe Califano to Dick McKay, June 20, 1968, Reference File, Gun Control, LBJPL; Dick McKay to Joe Califano, June 18, 1968, Reference File, Gun Control, LBJPL. Also see Memorandum to LBJ from Larry Levinson, June 18, 1968, in Reference File, Gun Control, LBJPL. The series of these original documents are found in White House Central Files, SP, LE, Boxes 5 and 80, LBJPL.

54. LBJ speech of May 22, 1964, quoted in America . . . the Beautiful. Let’s Keep It That Way (Democratic National Committee pamphlet), 1964, in Democratic National Committee Files, Series 1, Box 175, President Johnson, Campaign ’64: Official Campaign Slogans, Songs, Materials, Etc. File, LBJPL; Melody Webb, “Lyndon Johnson: The Last Frontier President,” Journal of the West 34, no. 2 (April 1995): 76.

55. “Conservation Comes of Age,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 10, 1965.

56. “Text of the White House Message on Guarding U.S. Beauty,” WP, February 9, 1965.

57. Graham quoted in Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 81; Sputnik is discussed in Caro, Master of the Senate, 1024; the counterpoising of alleged frontier or western values with those of the Soviets is discussed in Smith, “American Nightmare,” 227.

58. LBJ’s activities and an overview of his early speeches related to outer space are detailed in “Record of the Vice President on Space Activities during 1957–1962,” 1962, LBJPL, Reference Collection, Space Activities (LBJ’s) File; Dugger, The Politician, 143; LBJ’s statements spanning 1957 to 1963 all appear in George Reedy, “Statements of LBJ on Space Exploration,” prepared by the NASA Historical Staff, Washington, DC (no date), LBJPL, Office Files of White House Aides, Box 29; Dugger, The Politician, 145.

59. Carl Abbott, Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press), 23.

60. LBJ, “Remarks Following an Inspection of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans,” December 12, 1967, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238003; LBJ, “Address before the International Symposium on Physics and Medicine of Atmosphere and Space,” San Antonio, Texas, November 11, 1958, in LBJPL, Office Files of White House Aides, Box 29, George Reedy, “Statements of LBJ on Space Exploration,” prepared by the NASA Historical Staff, Washington, DC (no date); LBJ, “Special Message to the Congress on Election Reform: The Political Process in America,” May 25, 1967, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238563.

61. Address before Dolphin Club Meeting, Port Arthur, Texas, October 22, 1959, and Congressional Record, May 3, 1960, 8532–33.

62. These numerous technological devices are described in detail in a series of displays at the Lyndon Baines Johnson National Historic Park, visited by the author on September 30, 2011; see Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (1931; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959).

63. Caro, Master of the Senate, xviii.

64. Tom Wicker, “Lyndon Johnson Is 10 Feet Tall,” NYT Magazine, May 23, 1965, 88–92. Another journalist drew some similar comparisons of LBJ to TR, stating that “Like Theodore Roosevelt, Johnson has a compulsion to be ‘the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding’” (Stewart Alsop, “The One Weakness of L.B.J.,” Saturday Evening Post, September 19, 1964, 12).

65. LBJ, “Remarks at a Reception in Fort Worth Honoring Representative James C. Wright of Texas,” May 29, 1968, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237218; “socio-cultural furnace” quotation in Michael P. Malone, “Beyond the Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to American Western History,” Western Historical Quarterly 20 (November 1989): 410.

Chapter 3

Epigraph: LBJ quoted in Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy, 20.

1. “Political earthquake” phrase used by Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 2.

2. David Wise, “Dilemma Is In ‘Credibility Gap,’” New York Herald Tribune news service reprinted in the High Point (NC) Enterprise, May 28, 1965; Francis Edward Cheslik, Presidential Influence on the Media: A Descriptive Study of the Administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon (MA thesis, Wayne State University, 1977), 107–9; Hugh Sidey, A Very Personal Presidency: Lyndon Johnson in the White House (New York: Athenaeum, 1968), 167.

3. In 1951 Gene Autry, an avid supporter of FDR’s New Deal, promoted his “Cowboy Code”—or what amounted to a kind of frontier Ten Commandments—reflecting the power inherent in the genre to express dominant ideals and to persuade. Autry’s 10-Point Cowboy Code appears in MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace, 135; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 1: The Path to Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 160.

4. Dugger, The Politician, 43, 46, 36.

5. The political cartoon collection at the LBJPL contains more than three hundred cowboy, rancher, and gunfighter depictions of LBJ—many of which reveal this evolution in imagery.

6. See Caroll Kilpatrick, “US Can Continue the ‘Great Society’ and Fight in Vietnam, Johnson Says,” WP, January 13, 1966, 1; Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 283.

7. LBJ’s “bully” quotation in Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 95; “coonskin on the wall” quotation in Sidey, A Very Personal Presidency, 150.

8. T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: American Legacy Press, 1983), 447; Webb, The Great Plains, 173–74; John D. Pomfret, “The Johnson Formula: President Seeking to Neutralize G.O.P. on 2 Major Issues in Coming Campaign,” NYT, July 4, 1966; LBJ’s quotation of Captain McNelly in LBJ, foreword to Webb, The Texas Rangers, x; LBJ quoted in Clyde Milner, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 422.

9. Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory (New York: Free Press, 2001), 279.

10. LBJ, “Remarks to American and Korean Servicemen at Camp Stanley, Korea,” November 1, 1966, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237717. LBJ did have a great-uncle, John Wheeler Bunton, who fought (but did not die) in the Battle of San Jacinto—a story his mother related to him many times; see Roberts and Olson, A Line in the Sand, 279–80.

11. A discussion of LBJ’s dramatic stories of his encounter with Japanese zeros appears in Paul K. Conkin, Big Daddy from the Pedernales (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 108.

12. LBJ quoted in Dugger, The Politician, 31; Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy, 20.

13. LBJ quoted in Dugger, The Politician, 144.

14. Bill Davidson, “Lyndon Johnson: Can a Southerner Be Elected President?,” Look, August 18, 1959, 64. Johnson’s gender-mockery is described in Caro, The Passage of Power, 33; Larry L. King, “Machismo in the White House: LBJ and Vietnam,” American Heritage 27 (1976): 100; and Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, 23.

15. Stewart Udall’s description of LBJ’s performance quoted in King, “Machismo in the White House,” 99.

16. Ibid., 8–13, 98–101; see also Louis H. Lapham, “Who Is Lyndon Johnson?,” Saturday Evening Post, September 11, 1965, 70; Robert M. MacMillan quotes LBJ (“poor little boogers”) in an interview with Ronald Kessler, March 28, 1993, in Kessler, Inside the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 34.

17. LBJ did quote directly from Turner’s thesis in “Special Message to the Congress on Election Reform: The Political Process in America,” May 25, 1967, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238563.

18. LBJ, “Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at a Ceremony Marking 1966 as the ‘Year of the Bible,’” January 19, 1966, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/239240; Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 269, 270, 273; LBJ, “Remarks to the Delegates to a Conference of State Legislative Leaders,” June 16, 1966, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238723. Some of these passages from Turner and LBJ (though inaccurately quoted for both) can also be found in Dugger, The Politician, 132–33.

19. LBJ, “Remarks upon Receiving an Honorary Degree at the University of Denver,” August 26, 1966, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238929.

20. “Old Ho” quotation and significance of Barbara Ward’s book in Reedy, Lyndon Johnson, 23; Karnow, Vietnam, 321. A detailed account of Johnson’s pledges and offers of aid to Vietnam is found in Memorandum from Horace Busby to LBJ, “Your Statements in Vietnam,” April 1, 1965, LBJPL, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, Box 201; Waukesha (WI) Freeman’s editor quoted in Edward W. Chester, “Lyndon Baines Johnson, an American ‘King Lear’: A Critical Evaluation of His Newspaper Obituaries,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 326; “Freedom’s frontiers” quote in Dugger, The Politician, 143; See “Man of the Year: Lyndon B. Johnson, The Prudent Progressive,” Time, January 1, 1965, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,841674-1,00.xhtml.

21. LBJ, “Address at Johns Hopkins University: ‘Peace without Conquest,’” April 7, 1965, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241950.

22. MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace, 235–36.

23. Hugh Sidey, “A Question of Belief in Hanoi—and at Home,” Life, October 10, 1969, 4; Hugh Sidey, “History and Presidents” presentation, Miller Center, University of Virginia, June 30, 1992, reprinted in Miller Center Imprimatur 3, no. 1 (August 1992): 2.

24. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 535. This famous quotation from an unidentified US military officer was published by AP journalist Peter Barnett, “Major Describes Move,” NYT, February 8, 1968. The original quote was distorted in later publications into the better-known phrase, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”; LBJ quoted in Chester, “Lyndon Baines Johnson, an American ‘King Lear,’” 325.

25. Transcript, George Reedy Oral History Interview XI, December 20, 1983, by Michael L. Gillette, 48–49, Electronic Copy, LBJPL.

26. George Wallace quotation and Harris poll results in Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast, 211.

27. LBJ, “The President’s Address to the Nation Announcing Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam and Reporting His Decision Not to Seek Reelection,” March 31, 1968, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238065.

28. MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace, 138–39.

29. Gallup, The Gallup Poll . . . vol. 3: 1959–1971: 1222, 2083, 2100, 2113. For more detailed poll numbers, see George L. Grice, “‘We Are a People of Peace, But . . .’: A Rhetorical Study of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Statements on US Military Involvement in Vietnam” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 1976), 1, 10, 75, 76; for the Newsweek characterizations, see Louis Harris, “State of the LBJ Image,” Newsweek, January 9, 1967, 19; William C. Spragens, ed., Popular Images of American Presidents (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 485.

30. Conkin, Big Daddy from the Pedernales, 173.

31. Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 263.

32. Chester, “Lyndon Baines Johnson, an American ‘King Lear,’” 319, 320, 324, 325; Dan Morgan, Kilgore (TX) News Herald, 1973, LBJPL, Special Files: Cartoon Collection, Box 9, File 36—Funeral.

33. Though perplexed and frustrated, LBJ for his part was never able to come to terms with the event-structure dichotomy. Instead, Johnson almost certainly believed that some Americans had betrayed the myth when thousands rioted in the milieu of forward-looking Great Society programs designed to help them and protested against a war that he believed was part of America’s national mission. Johnson remained defiant until his death in 1973, telling Doris Kearns and the LBJ Library director that he believed history would vindicate his decisions as president.

34. D. W. Brogan, “Americans: ‘Short Distance’ Crusaders,” Des Moines Register, October 29, 1967, quoted in Robert Jewett, The Captain America Complex: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973), 215; Saul Pett, “Oh America, What Have You Become?,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, February 15, 1970.

35. Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment, 2.

36. “An Interview with Oriana Fallaci: Kissinger,” New Republic, December 16, 1972, 21.

37. The Statler Brothers, “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott,” Carry Me Back (Mercury Records, 1973).

38. George Brown Tindall and David A. Shi, America: A Narrative History, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 1595.

39. Spragens, Popular Images of American Presidents, 604.

40. Jimmy Carter, “The State of the Union Address Delivered before a Joint Session of the Congress,” January 23, 1980, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/249681.

41. Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast, 280; “President Wobble,” NYT, October 26, 1980; Harris poll results in Spragens, Popular Images of American Presidents, 604–5; “mad as hell” quotation from Network, directed by Sidney Lumet (Hollywood, CA: MGM/United Artists, 1976).

Chapter 4

Epigraph: Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Rally for Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming in Cheyenne,” March, 2, 1982, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/245421.

1. Walter R. Fisher, “Romantic Democracy, Ronald Reagan, and Presidential Heroes,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 46, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 299–310.

2. Jim Hightower, “I Didn’t Lose, I Just Ran Out of Time,” Washington Monthly, October 1980, quoted in Sean P. Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 174.

3. Correspondence from Wichita Falls voter to Reagan in Sears Correspondence, May 1976, Citizens for Reagan Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, quoted in Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 175.

4. Letter from “Old Cowboy” to Reagan in Middletown Journal, October 12, 1980, Box 483, Research & Policy Files, Pre-Presidential Papers of Ronald Reagan, 1980 Campaign Files, RRPL, quoted in Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 211.

5. Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 5.

6. Fisher, “Romantic Democracy,” 302.

7. Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America, quoted in Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 160.

8. Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 5–6.

9. In 1964 liberal LBJ captured more than 90 percent of the Electoral College vote over ultraconservative Goldwater; Reagan reversed this in 1980 by capturing 90 percent of the electoral votes from incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter. See APP, Presidential Elections Data, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/elections.php (accessed September 3, 2014).

10. Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 211.

11. Ronald Reagan, “Election Eve Address: A Vision for America,” November 3, 1980, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/285591; Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 219.

12. Reagan’s six movie westerns were Law and Order (1932), Santa Fe Trail (1940), The Bad Man (1941), The Last Outpost (1951), Cattle Queen of Montana (1954), and Tennessee’s Partner (1955). The one exception to Reagan’s Hollywood good-guy roles was his evil persona in The Killers (1964), where he slapped around co-star Angie Dickinson. Reagan confessed later he wished he had never played that part.

13. During his Hollywood days, Reagan’s desire to star in more westerns than he ultimately did is discussed in Murdoch, The American West, 111.

14. Hedrick Smith, Adam Clymer, et al., Reagan the Man, the President (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 22–29.

15. Reagan, “Election Eve Address.” The original draft is dated October 28, 1980, and appeared on display in the RRPL Museum in August 2011.

16. Reagan’s entry for January 28, 1982, in Ronald Reagan with Douglas Brinkley, ed., The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 65.

17. Gary L. Gregg, “Ronald Reagan and the Rebuilding of the Symbolic Presidency,” in Paul Kengor and Peter Schweizer, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Assessing the Man and His Legacy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 139.

18. Sarah Russell Hankins, “Archetypal Alloy: Reagan’s Rhetorical Image,” Communication Studies 34, no. 1 (1983): 34–35.

19. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1987), 48; Robert Lindsey, “A Cowboy Hero, Myth and Reality: Western Presidency,” NYT, January 21, 1981.

20. See Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 246.

21. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a White House Meeting with Members of the American Business Conference,” March 13, 1985, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259006. Reagan is quoting “Dirty Harry” Callahan from Sudden Impact, directed by Clint Eastwood (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1983).

22. “President Reagan’s Trips to Rancho Del Cielo, California, 1981–1989,” RRPL, http://reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/tripsranch.xhtml/ (accessed February 3, 2011); WHTV footage of President Reagan at ranch, September 1, 1982, to August 14, 1985, RRPL, Film Collection; Rancho Del Cielo: Reagan Ranch, California (Los Angeles, CA: Huell Howser Productions, 2005).

23. Steven Barrie-Anthony, “Home Is Where His Heart Was,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2004.

24. Wilbur Edel quoted in Steven J. Rubenzer and Thomas R. Faschingbauer, Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2004), 178.

25. Ibid., 183.

26. Wilbur Edel, The Reagan Presidency: An Actor’s Finest Performance (New York: Hippocrene, 1992), 5, 65.

27. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1962).

28. For the complete list of films of the Reagans’ White House movie nights, see RRPL, “Films President and Mrs. Reagan Viewed,” http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/filmsviewed.xhtml (accessed February 3, 2011).

29. Murdoch, The American West, 115.

30. Reagan response letter to Peter Aviles, January 28, 1985, RRPL, Presidential Handwriting File Series II: Presidential Records, Box 11, Folder 162 (January 26, 1985, to January 28, 1985), PR007 287180.

31. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Opening of ‘The American Cowboy’ Exhibit at the Library of Congress,” March 24, 1983, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/262135.

32. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address,” January 21, 1985, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259910.

33. Reagan’s autobiography quoted in Murdoch, The American West, 114.

34. Murdoch, The American West, 114.

35. Lindsey, “A Cowboy Hero, Myth and Reality,” 19.

36. For example, see Nancy K. Anderson, “Curious Historical Artistic Data,” in David Jules Prown et al., Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 4–5.

37. Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, 91.

38. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Republican Party Fundraising Dinner in Houston, Texas,” September 22, 1988, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259910.

39. Andrew Kopkind, “The Age of Reaganism,” The Nation, June 7, 2004, http://www.thenation.com/print/article/age-reaganism.

Chapter 5

Epigraph: Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Republican Campaign Rally in Mesquite, Texas,” November 5, 1988, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/252725.

1. For example, see Robert Goldberg’s description of Goldwater versus Reagan in Goldberg, “The Western Hero in Politics,” 29–30.

2. Prouder, Stronger, Better [aka Morning in America], GOP Convention Film, August 23, 1984, and Ronald Reagan presidential campaign television commercial, directed by John Pytka (Venice, CA: Pytka Productions, 1984).

3. William F. Lewis, “Telling America’s Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 286.

4. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1981, APP, http://www.presidency.uscb.edu/node/259910.

5. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Federal Tax Reduction Legislation,” July 27, 1981, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/246682.

6. Reagan, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1981.

7. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Eve of the Presidential Election,” November 5, 1984, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/260734.

8. Ole Moen, “Frontier and Region: The West and American Exceptionalism from John Winthrop to Ronald W. Reagan,” American Studies in Scandinavia 22 (1990): 66.

9. John Herbers, “West Taking South’s Place as Most Alienated Area,” NYT, March 18, 1979.

10. “The Sagebrush Rebellion,” US News and World Report, December 1, 1980, http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/PVCC/mbase/docs/sagebrush.xhtml.

11. White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 567.

12. Robert H. Nelson, “Why the Sagebrush Rebellion Burned Out,” Regulation 8, no. 3 (May–June 1984): 35.

13. For a solid overview of the Sagebrush Rebellion from the perspective of a federal economist, see ibid., 27–35.

14. Michael Deaver quote appears in Lou Cannon interview with Bernard von Bothmer, April 27, 2004; Cannon interview quoted in Bernard von Bothmer, Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 65.

15. Cannon interview with von Bothmer, April 27, 2004, quoted in Bothmer, Framing the Sixties, 65.

16. “Reagan: A Time for Choosing,” PBS-TV, The American Experience, transcript available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/reagan-goldwater/ (accessed July 25, 2013).

17. Jimmy Carter, “Presidential Debate in Cleveland,” October 28, 1980, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/217132.

18. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with the Students and Faculty at Moscow State University,” May 31, 1988, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/254054.

19. Michael Dorris, “The Cowboy and the Indians: Reagan’s Patronizing Remarks Add Insult to Injury,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1988; Sarah Deutsch, George J. Sánchez, and Gary Y. Okihiro, “Contemporary People/Contested Spaces,” in Clyde A. Milner, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 661.

20. Reagan Library cartoons by Paul Conrad, Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1991, and from the Baltimore Evening Sun (cartoonist unknown; no date).

21. Bruce Beattie, Daytona Beach (FL) News Journal, 1988.

22. Moyers quoted in Michael Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.

23. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with State and Local Officials during a White House Briefing on the Program for Economic Recovery,” May 28, 1981, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/246464.

24. Ronald Reagan, “Message to the Congress Submitting the National Materials and Minerals Program Plan and Report,” April 5, 1982, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/244831.

25. Steven Waldman and Rich Thomas, “How Did It Happen?,” Newsweek, May 21, 1990, 27–28.

26. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address,” January 21, 1985, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259910.

27. Ibid.

28. David R. Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 195, 198.

29. Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 122.

30. “Reaganomics,” US History Online, http://www.ushistory.org/us/596.asp (accessed October 21, 2014).

31. Rick Perlstein, “What Would Ronnie Do?” Newsweek, January 31, 2011, 27.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Elaine B. Sharp, The Sometime Connection: Public Opinion and Social Policy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 39.

35. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet (accessed November 14, 2014).

36. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Republican Campaign Rally in Mesquite, Texas.”

37. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Take Pride in America Awards,” July 26, 1988, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/254356.

38. See Reeves, President Reagan, 458–59.

39. S&L figures appear in Waldman and Thomas, “How Did It Happen?” 27–28.

40. Michael Mandelbaum, “American Policy: The Luck of the President,” Foreign Affairs 64 (1985): 406.

41. William Safire, “Ronnie Le Cowboy,” NYT, June 16, 1980; Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1964).

42. Memorandum from Richard B. Wirthlin to Governor Reagan, Ambassador Bush, Senator Laxalt, Ambassador Armstrong, William Casey, and Deputy Campaign Directors, Reagan Bush Committee, August 9, 1980, “Focused Impact Theme: Foreign Affairs,” RRPL, Reagan, Ronald: 1980 Campaign Papers 1965–1980, Series III: Ed Meese Files—Campaign Operations, Box 110, “Meese, Ed—Campaign Operations—Reagan for President [General]” File.

43. “Peace” Television Commercials, QRRB 0193 and 0105, September 2, 1980, RRPL, Reagan, Ronald: 1980 Campaign Papers 1965–1980, Series V: Media, Promotion, Advertising (Dailey)—Media Campaign Speeches 9/1980, Box 228, Media Campaign (Peter Dailey)—[Spots-Scripts-Television Commercials] (2/2).

44. Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan, 181.

45. Reagan “thugs” quotation in “US Troops Invade Grenada,” Fort Worth (TX) Star-Telegram, October 26, 1983, 1.

46. Ronald Reagan: “Address to the Nation on Events in Lebanon and Grenada,” October 27, 1983, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/261953; Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (1997; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 284.

47. Parmet, George Bush, 284.

48. Robert L. Ivie, “Speaking ‘Common Sense’ about the Soviet Threat,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 48 (1984): 42, quoted in Craig Allen Smith, “Mister Reagan’s Neighborhood: Rhetoric and National Unity,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 52 (1987): 227.

49. George F. Will, “Smile If (and Only If) You’re Conservative,” WP, February 23, 2006.

50. Reagan turkey quote in Marilyn and Hy Gardner, “Glad You Asked That!” Kilgore (TX) News Herald, September 13, 1980.

51. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida,” March 8, 1983, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/262885.

52. Most famously, Reagan listed examples of Soviet crimes in Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Civilian Airliner,” September 5, 1983, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/245808; and his original “Evil Empire” speech delivered in London: Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” June 8, 1982, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/245236.

53. John G. Freund, email correspondence with author, November 25, 2019; Bernard Gwertzman, “Gentle Jabs Mark Haig’s Farewell,” NYT, June 30, 1982.

54. “The Bear” or “President Reagan: Prepared for Peace,” TV ad from the 1984 Reagan presidential campaign, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpwdcmjBgNA (accessed January 10, 2020).

55. Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987), 360.

56. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” March 23, 1983, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/262125.

57. Charles Krauthammer, “The Illusion of Star Wars: The Worst Offense Is a Bad Defense,” New Republic, May 14, 1984, 13.

58. Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, 6th ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 123, 389.

59. USA Today advertisement excerpts appear in Krauthammer, “The Illusion of Star Wars,” 424.

60. Ibid.

61. Jerry Robinson cartoon reprinted in Della J. Attisani, A Power beyond Words: An Examination of the Rhetoric of Cartoon Art about Ronald Reagan (MA thesis, Florida Atlantic University, August 1996), 145.

62. See Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

63. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 584.

64. Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, 186 (entry for October 10, 1983).

65. The power of film in influencing and informing Ronald Reagan was explored in Jill Dougherty, “Secret Video Briefings for President Reagan: CIA Found Novel Way to Brief Ex-Actor,” CNN Report, November 10, 2011.

66. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 118.

67. Reagan, An American Life, 586.

68. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 121.

69. Farber, The Rise and Fall of American Conservatism, 204.

70. Ronald E. Powaski, Return to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1981–1999 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40.

71. See David Murray, “The Rise of Ronald Reagan,” The Progressive, February 1968, 19.

72. Reagan, An American Life, 550.

73. Ibid., 547.

74. Stanley Feldman and Lee Sigelman, “The Political Impact of Prime-Time Television: ‘The Day After,’” Journal of Politics 47, no. 2 (June 1985): 571.

75. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Reporters on a Meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko,” September 11, 1984, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/261219.

76. Farber, The Rise and Fall of American Conservatism, 204.

77. Ibid., 205–6.

78. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “Myth of the Nuclear Cowboy,” WP, January 8, 1988.

79. Photograph of Gorbachev in backward Stetson appeared on display at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, August 2011; also see Jennifer Warren, “Gorbachev Rides Crest: Ex-Soviet Leader Came, Saw, Conquered California,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1992.

80. Paul Laxalt Interview, Ronald Reagan Oral History Project, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, October 9, 2001, 25.

81. Digitized versions of these entries into Caspar Weinberger’s diary, December 7, 1985, are available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/14-Weinberger%20Diaries%20Dec%207%20handwritten.pdf (accessed March 12, 2012).

82. Iran-Contra investigation report quoted in Eric Pianin and Thomas B. Edsall, “Schisms from Administration Lingered for Years,” WP, June 9, 2004; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 648.

83. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 648.

84. Cannon, President Reagan, 356–57.

85. Polling data discussed in Spragens, Popular Images of American Presidents, 605.

86. Quotation from Tindall and Shi, America, 1615.

87. Reagan made this statement numerous times throughout his political career. This version is quoted from Ronald Reagan, Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 419; it was taken from a Reagan speech delivered on December 11, 1972.

88. Pianin and Edsall, “Schisms from the Administration.”

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid.

91. In contrast to conservative and some moderates’ perceptions, many liberals believe that Reagan did major short-and long-term damage to the middle class. See Paul Krugman, “Debunking the Reagan Myth,” NYT, January 21, 2008; Paul Craig Roberts, The Supply-Side Revolution: An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 186–87, 191–92.

92. Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism, xiii, 235.

93. Gerhard Peters. “Final Presidential Job Approval Ratings,” 1999–2009, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/final_approval.php.

94. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana,” August 15, 1988, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/255347.

95. Ronald Reagan, “Unforgettable John Wayne,” Reader’s Digest, October 1979, 118.

96. Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism, 163.

97. See Jeff Roche, ed., The Political Culture of the New West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 3.

98. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Republican Campaign Rally in Mesquite, Texas.”

99. Ibid.

Chapter 6

Epigraph: George W. Bush: “Remarks to Employees in the Pentagon and an Exchange with Reporters in Arlington, Virginia,” September 17, 2001, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/211537.

1. Stephen McVeigh, The American Western (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), viii, vii.

2. R. W. Apple Jr., “Bush Offering a Special Mix: Ivy League and Pork Rinds,” NYT, January 19, 1989.

3. Ibid.

4. Karen S. Hoffman, “Visual Persuasion in George W. Bush’s Presidency: Cowboy Imagery in Public Discourse,” Congress & the Presidency 38 (2011): 336. Also see Karen Olsson, “A Shrub Grows in Midland,” Texas Observer, June 25, 1999, http://www.texasobserver.org/1175-a-shrub-grows-in-midland/.

5. Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (New York: Three Rivers, 1999), 8.

6. George W. Bush, “Remarks Honoring President Theodore Roosevelt’s 150th Birthday,” October 27, 2008, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/285128.

7. Ibid.

8. Edmund Morris quoted in Burt Solomon, “The Cult of TR,” National Journal 34, no. 7 (2002): 452.

9. Alex Spillius, “George Bush the Texan Is ‘Scared of Horses,’” The Telegraph (UK), September 21, 2007.

10. As David Farber has assessed, during the Bush presidency big oil and other major extractive industries “were in the catbird seat” while those seeking government regulation “had no place at the table.” Even Theodore Roosevelt’s old stomping ground in North Dakota was soon in trouble from oil drilling. See Farber, The Rise and Fall of American Conservatism, 239. For the impact of Bush’s policies on TR’s ranch, see Bill Donahue, “Beauty and the Badlands: In a State Where George Bush Sees Oil, Teddy Roosevelt Found Immortality and Mystery,” Sierra 87, no. 2 (March–April 2002): 34–43.

11. Eric O’Keefe, “The Bush Ranch,” Cowboys and Indians (December 2002), quoted in Mark West and Chris Carey, “Re (Enacting) Frontier Justice: The Bush Administration’s Tactical Narration of the Old West Fantasy after September 11,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (November 2006): 393.

12. For an excellent examination of Bush’s prepresidential persona, see Farber, The Rise and Fall of American Conservatism, 217–19, 231–36.

13. “George W. Bush Against Telling Other Nations What to Do—2000 Presidential Debate,” October 11, 2000, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_b2wRPgcyw; Ronald Brownstein, “Bush’s Rustic Vacation Continues Clinton Contrast,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2001, quoted in Holiday Dmitri, Frontier Justice: Cowboy Ethics and the Bush Doctrine of Preemption (MA thesis, University of Chicago, August 2003), 33–34.

14. Bush quoted in Farber, The Rise and Fall of American Conservatism, 235.

15. Eileen Boris, “On Cowboys and Welfare Queens: Independence, Dependence, and Interdependence at Home and Abroad,” Journal of American Studies 41 (2007): 618.

16. Bill Keller, “The Radical Presidency of George W. Bush: Reagan’s Son,” NYT Magazine, January 26, 2003.

17. “Special Report on the Reagan Legacy: He Led a Revolution. Will It Survive?,” The Economist, June 12, 2004, 26.

18. See quotations from Robert Novak in Keller, “The Radical Presidency of George W. Bush,” and the Bush-vs.-Reagan deficits described in Farber, The Rise and Fall of American Conservatism, 238.

19. Doug Patton, “Bring It On, Mr. President!,” Gopusa, July 7, 2003, http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/dpatton/2003/dp_0707p.shtml.

20. The Republicans’ target audience discussed in West and Carey, “(Re) Enacting Frontier Justice,” 402.

21. “Special Report on the Reagan Legacy,” 26.

22. Stanley A. Renshon, “Presidential Address: George W. Bush’s Cowboy Politics: An Inquiry,” Political Psychology 26, no. 4 (2005): 590.

23. Ibid., 591.

24. George W. Bush, “Remarks to the Community at Travis Air Force Base, California,” October 17, 2001, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/213420.

25. George W. Bush, “Remarks to Employees in the Pentagon and an Exchange with Reporters in Arlington, Virginia.”

26. New York Post poster described in Ryan Malphurs, “The Media’s Frontier Construction of George W. Bush,” Journal of American Culture 31, no. 2 (June 2008): 195.

27. George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq,” March 17, 2003, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/212791.

28. OTC Journal quoted in Karen Dodwell, “From the Center: The Cowboy Myth, George W. Bush, and the War with Iraq,” Americana, March 2004, http://www.americanpopularculture.com/archive/politics/cowboy_myth.xhtml.

29. Barry Stephenson, “Swaggering Savagery and the New Frontier,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 16 (Summer 2007), http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art16-swaggering.xhtml; Donald Rumsfeld, “Fort Carson Town Hall Meeting,” http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?/TranscriptID=3543, quoted in ibid (accessed March 2005).

30. George W. Bush, “Remarks to Employees in the Pentagon and an Exchange with Reporters in Arlington, Virginia.”

31. Ibid.

32. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, rev. ed. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1984), 15, quoted in Dmitri, “Frontier Justice,” 18.

33. Since the nineteenth century, the Colt single-action six-shooter has sometimes been referred to as “Judge Colt and His Jury of Six.” The remainder of this sentence is discussed in ibid.

34. Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (New York: Dutton, 2004), 2, quoted in Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism, 242.

35. George W. Bush, “Remarks Following a Meeting with the National Security Team,” September 12, 2001, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/216499.

36. For two “with us or against us” examples, see George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Middle East,” June 24, 2002, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/215798, and Bush, “The President’s News Conference with President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland,” July 17, 2002, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/215347.

37. Dmitri, “Frontier Justice,” 12.

38. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 256, quoted in Dmitri, “Frontier Justice,” 17.

39. George W. Bush, “Remarks at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service,” September 14, 2001, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/213374.

40. Days at the ranches and visiting leaders as reported by the WP in Hoffman, “Visual Persuasion in George W. Bush’s Presidency,” 327.

41. The Daily Show, Comedy Central Network, May 14, 2003, quoted in West and Carey, “(Re)Enacting Frontier Justice,” 394.

42. President Bush’s “I’m a windshield rancher” self-description in Gregg Moss and Emily Narvaes, “There Ain’t No ‘W’ in Cattle Ranchin’,” Denver Post, February 10, 2002.

43. Don Santina, “Cowboy Imagery and the American Presidency: Ride ’Em, Brush Cutter!,” CounterPunch, December 19, 2005, http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/12/19/ride-em-brush-cutter/.

44. Steven R. Weisman, “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch . . . and Other Vacation Tales: The Presidential Search for the Inner Cowboy,” NYT, January 2, 2002.

45. Liz Marlantes, “More John Wayne Rhetoric Infuses Politics,” Christian Science Monitor, July 18, 2003.

46. George W. Bush, A Charge to Keep (New York: Morrow, 1999).

47. All quotations in Scott Horton, “The Illustrated President,” Harper’s, January 24, 2008, http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/the-illustrated-president/.

48. Dick Cheney, vice president’s speeches, June 30, 2003 (for example), http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/, quoted in West and Carey, “(Re)Enacting Frontier Justice,” 392.

49. Bush quotation from June 2002 appears at Frontline, “The Evolution of the Bush Doctrine,” PBS Online, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.xhtml (accessed March 25, 2014).

50. “Full Text of Brokaw’s Interview with Bush,” NYT, April 25, 2003.

51. Jonathon Freedland, “Don’t Be Fooled Again,” The Guardian (UK), February 4, 2004.

52. Jack Kelly, “Bush Re-Enacts ‘High Noon’ at the United Nations,” Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, September 18, 2002.

53. Ron Grossman, “Taking Apart the New Deal,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 2003, quoted in Dmitri, “Frontier Justice,” 24.

54. Bush quoted from Woodward, Bush at War, 81, quoted in Dmitri, “Frontier Justice,” 24.

55. Shane, directed by George Stevens (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1953); The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges (Hollywood, CA: United Artists, 1960).

56. George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2011, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/213749.

57. Bush quotation from Woodward, Bush at War, 340, appears in Dmitri, “Frontier Justice,” 27.

58. Woodward, Bush at War, 339.

59. Robert A. Divine, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000): 85, quoted in Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush: Historical Comparisons of Ends and Means in Their Foreign Policies,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 3 (June 2006): 536.

60. Timothy Egan, “All Polls Aside, Utah Is Keeping Faith in Bush,” NYT, June 4, 2006, quoted in Hoffman, Visual Persuasion in George W. Bush’s Presidency, 332.

61. Matthews quoted in Stephenson, “Swaggering Savagery.”

62. Andrew Bernstein, “In Defense of the Cowboy,” March 8, 2003, https://www.andrewbernstein.net/2003/03/in-defense-of-the-cowboy/.

63. Media quotations appear in Dodwell, “From the Center.”

64. Kelly, “Bush Re-Enacts ‘High Noon’ at the United Nations.”

65. David E. Sanger, “To Some in Europe, the Major Problem Is Bush the Cowboy,” NYT, January 24, 2003.

66. Tonto cartoon in The Observer (London), January 19, 2003, described in Sanger, “To Some in Europe.”

67. Quotation from Japan’s Kyodo News Agency appears in J. Hoberman, “It’s Always ‘High Noon’ at the White House,” NYT, April 25, 2004.

68. Takashi Oka, “Japan’s Economic High Noon,” Christian Science Monitor, January 7, 2002, http://csmonitor.com/2002/0107/p9s1-coop.xhtml, quoted in West and Carey, “(Re)Enacting Frontier Justice,” 395.

69. Koizumi quoted in Hoberman, “It’s Always ‘High Noon’ at the White House.”

70. Japanese public opinion differed starkly from that of Koizumi’s. When asked in July 2003 if weapons of mass destruction were “a legitimate reason for the invasion of Iraq,” 60 percent responded in the negative and 25 percent positive. Polling data appears in Paul Midford, Japanese Public Opinion and the War on Terrorism: Implications for Japan’s Security Strategy (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2006), 42, 48.

71. Erik Baard, “George Bush Ain’t No Cowboy,” Village Voice, September 21, 2004, http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/186337/.

72. Arbuckle column from The Oregonian, quoted in John Potter, “Bush Gives Cowboys Bad Image,” Billings (MT) Gazette, March 8, 2003.

73. See Dodwell, “From the Center”; Susan Faludi, “An American Myth Rides into the Sunset,” NYT, March 30, 2003.

74. John Lewis Gaddis, “Grand Strategy in the Second Term,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 1 (January–February 2005): 6.

75. NBC’s Cameron Brown quoted in Dodwell, “From the Center.”

76. Piers Morgan quoted in Dodwell, “From the Center.”

77. 2004 presidential election exit polling data from November 3, 2004, appears [in German] in Helmut Norpoth, “Mission Accomplished: Die Wiederwahl von George W. Bush” [The re-election of George W. Bush], Politische Vierteljahresschrift 46, no. 1 (March 2005): 5.

78. Robert Kagan, “The September 12 Paradigm: America, the World, and George W. Bush,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 5 (September–October 2008): 36; polling figures translated from Jurgen Wilzewski, “‘Lessons to Be Learned’: Die Bush-Doktrin, der Irakkrieg und die präventive Weltordnungspolitik der USA,” American Studies 53, no. 3 (2008): 357.

79. “Bush Will Watch What He Says in Second Term,” ABC News.com, January 13, 2005, http://abcnews.go.com, quoted in Malphurs, “The Media’s Frontier Construction of George W. Bush,” 196.

80. Gary J. Bass and Time quotations in Allen and Ratnesar, “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy,” 14.

81. Victor Davis Hanson, “How Now, Cowboy? The Uses and Abuses of a National Icon,” National Review, August 7, 2006, 24, quoted in Price, “Cowboys and Presidents,” 65.

82. Price, “Cowboys and Presidents,” 65.

83. See Time’s attention-grabbing “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy” cover at http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060717,00.xhtml.

84. Peter Hecht, “Clinton Pledges Leadership: ‘The Era of Cowboy Diplomacy Is Over,’” Sacramento Bee, October 1, 2007.

85. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 324.

86. Ibid.

87. Tim Russert interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, NBC News, March 16, 2003.

88. See interview with Iraqi political scientist Azhar Abdul-Karim Abdul-Wahab in Mark Kukis, Voices from Iraq, 2003–2009: A People’s History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 54–55.

89. Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism, 248.

90. Ibid., 251.

91. Mark Danner, “We Are All Torturers Now,” NYT, January 6, 2005.

92. Al Neuharth, “Should Cowboy Bush Ride into the Sunset?” USA Today, May 13, 2004.

93. Douglas Brinkley, “The Test of Time,” Texas Monthly (March 2007), https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-test-of-time/.

94. Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism, 251.

95. “Bush and Public Opinion: Reviewing the Bush Years and the Public’s Final Verdict,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, December 18, 2008, http://www.people-press.org/2008/12/18/bush-and-public-opinion/, 5, 2, 3, 6.

96. In 2002 a strong plurality of Americans stated in the Pew polling data that the best way to reduce terrorism was to boost American military involvement abroad, but by 2008 a strong plurality had reversed this position and indicated that reducing America’s military presence overseas would most likely reduce the threat of attacks (ibid., 18).

97. Gallup Poll (online), “Presidential Approval Ratings—George W. Bush,” February 1, 2001, to January 11, 2009, https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx.

Epilogue

Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 241.

1. Douglas Kellner, “Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying: Presidential Rhetoric in the ‘War on Terror,’” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (December 2007): 622–43; Paul Krugman, “Errors and Lies,” NYT, May 15, 2015.

2. Nana J. Jhaveri, “Petroimperialism: US Oil Interests and the Iraq War,” Antipode 36, no. 1 (January 2004): 2–10; Philippe Le Billon and Favad El Khativ, “From Free Oil to ‘Freedom Oil’: Terrorism, War and US Geopolitics in the Persian Gulf,” Geopolitics 9, no. 1 (2004): 109–37.

3. LBJ, “Remarks in Chicago before the National Association of Broadcasters,” April 1, 1968, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28774.

4. See Michael Crowley, “Iraq’s Eternal War,” Time, June 30, 2014, 28–34.

5. Nancy Benac, “Reagan, Bush, Clinton Rated So-So,” Ventura County (CA) Star, February 9, 1997.

6. Polling data from Frank Newport, “Americans Say Reagan Is the Greatest President,” Gallup, February 18, 2011, http://www.gallup.com/poll/146183/Americans-Say-Reagan-Greatest-Presding.aspx. This is the most recent poll in which Gallup asked this question. All quotations appear in Jennifer Medina, “Centennial a Tribute to Reagan’s Influence,” Austin (TX) American-Statesman, February 4, 2011.

7. Howard Kurtz, “Ditching Dubya: The Top GOP Candidates Were Bush-Backers—and Are Running from His Legacy as Fast as They Can,” Newsweek, March 19, 2012, 25.

8. William Cronon, “When the G.O.P. Was Green,” NYT, January 8, 2001.

9. “Text: Obama Address on the Economy in Kansas,” CBS News, December 6, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-obama-address-on-the-economy-in-kansas/; “President Obama Aptly Invokes Teddy Roosevelt in Kansas Speech,” (New Jersey) Star-Ledger, December 8, 2011. Among those most critical of Obama’s speech, see Douglas Holtz-Eakin, “Obama’s Hypocritical, Incoherent and Unpresidential Economic Speech,” FoxNews.com, December 8, 2011, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/12/08/obamas-hypocritical-incoherent-and-unpresidential-economic-speech/.

10. See Barack Obama speeches delivered on February 12, September 3, and October 9, 2009; February 16, 2011; and October 25, 2012, APP website.

11. Richard Lowry, “TR and His Fan: Roosevelt and McCain, for Good and Ill,” National Review, February 7, 2000, 32; Michael Knox Beran, “McCain’s Cult of Teddy Roosevelt: The Sage of Sagamore Hill was Not a Conservative,” National Review Online, July 16, 2008, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/225038/mccains-cult-teddy-roosevelt/michael-knox-beran/page/0/1.

12. Daniel M. Fox and Howard Markel, “Is History Relevant to Implementing Health Reform?,” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 303, no. 17 (May 5, 2010): 1749–50.

13. Michael Kazin, “Trump and American Populism: Old Whine, New Bottles,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 6 (2016): 23.

14. Donald J. Trump, “Remarks on Signing a Memorandum on National Space Traffic Management Policy,” June 28, 2018, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/332603.

15. Derek Hawkins, “Trump Reveals Space Force Logo, and ‘Star Trek’ Fans Aren’t Happy,” WP, January 25, 2020, washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/01/25/space-force-logo/.

16. Murdoch, The American West, 119.

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Films and Television Programs

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The Day After. ABC-TV, directed by Nicholas Meyer. Aired November 20, 1983.

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High Noon. Directed by Fred Zinnemann. Hollywood, CA: United Artists, 1952.

The Hill Country: Lyndon Johnson’s Texas. NBC-TV Special, aired May 9, 1966.

Lyndon Baines Johnson: 36th President. LBJ Library and Museum.

The Magnificent Seven. Directed by John Sturges. Hollywood, CA: United Artists, 1960.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Directed by John Ford. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1962.

Network. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Hollywood, CA: MGM/United Artists, 1976.

Prouder, Stronger, Better [aka Morning in America]. Republican National Convention film, August 23, 1984. Directed by John Pytka. Venice, CA: Pytka Productions, 1984.

Russert, Tim. Interview with Vice President Dick Cheney. Meet the Press. NBC, aired March 16, 2003.

Shane. Directed by George Stevens. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1953.

Stagecoach. Directed by John Ford. Hollywood, CA: United Artists, 1939.

Star Trek. Created by Gene Roddenberry. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Studios, 1966–1969.

Sudden Impact. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1983.

Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King. Directed by Edwin S. Porter. New York: Edison Manufacturing Company, 1901.

INDEX

Abbreviations

GWB

George W. Bush

LBJ

Lyndon B. Johnson

RR

Ronald Reagan

TR

Theodore Roosevelt

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

References to illustrations appear in italic type.

Afghanistan: Soviet war in, 139, 153, 186; war following September 11 attacks, 185–86, 192–93, 201–2, 208

African Americans, 40–42, 91–92, 156, 175

After the Ride (statue), 211, 211

Alamo, Battle of the, 92, 159, 173, 177; syndrome and LBJ, 102, 110–12, 117

Alamo, The (film), 176

Albuquerque, N.Mex., 68

al-Qaeda, 13, 202, 205, 208, 219; depicted as savages by GWB, 186

Alsop, Stewart, 67

“America: Reagan Country” (slogan and poster), 140–41, 141, 211

American Cowboy, The (Library of Congress exhibit), 145

American exceptionalism, 4, 46, 109, 152. See also Bush Doctrine; conservation; “Old Europe”; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Reagan, Ronald; Roosevelt, Theodore

American Indians. See Native Americans

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, 193

anticommunism, 58–60, 81, 94, 162–66, 219. See also under Reagan, Ronald

Antiquities Act (1906), 45–46

approval ratings, 208; Jimmy Carter, 129; LBJ, 88, 115, 122–23, 175; RR, 175; GWB, 198–99, 201, 206–7

Arbuckle, Deana Duke, 197

Arizona, 81–82, 86–87

assassinations, 10; John F. Kennedy, 60, 63, 71; Robert F. Kennedy, 123; Martin Luther King Jr., 120, 123; William McKinley, 26, 27, 30; RR, attempt on, 174; TR, attempt on, 54

atrocities, 205; committed in Vietnam War, 116; GWB’s justification of torture in war on terror, 187–88

Autobiography, An (Roosevelt), 46

Autry, Gene, 77, 103, 205, 233n3

Aviles, Peter, 145

Baard, Eric, 197

Bailey, Thomas, 36, 109

Bass, Gary J., 203

Beard, Charles A., 4, 219

“Bear in the Woods” (ad), 166

Bedtime for Brezhnev (poster), 165–66, 165

Begala, Paul, 212

Ben Tre, South Vietnam, 118

Bernstein, Andrew, 195

Billington, Ray Allen, 6, 17, 90, 96, 100, 132, 146, 150, 190, 209

bin Laden, Osama, 178, 185, 201–2

Blair, Tony, compared with Tonto, 192, 196

Blazing Saddles (film), 127

Blum, John Morton, 30

bonanza economic development, 5, 46, 74, 108, 158. See also financial crisis of 2008

Bond, Julian, 175

Boone and Crockett Club, 45, 166

Boston, Mass., 70, 70

Brands, Henry William, 32, 38

Brezhnev, Leonid, 165, 165

Brinkley, Douglas, 22, 44–45, 54, 205

Brogan, Denis William, 125

Brown, Michael T., 32, 35

Brownstein, Ronald, 182

Brownsville (Tex.) Affair, 40

Bryan, William Jennings, 27, 36

Buckley, William F., 195

Bush, George H. W., 140, 158, 160, 172, 179, 210, 217

Bush, George W., 7, 74, 177, 212; Bill Clinton image contrasted with, 182; contrived or “fake” cowboy president, 179, 180, 183, 189–90, 197; core conservative frontier myth beliefs of, 181–82; cowboy rhetoric fails in Iraq War, 190–91, 194, 198–201, 209–10; cowboy-speak in war on terror, 11, 178–79, 184–85, 190, 219; creating cowboy persona of, 178–80, 182, 189, 190; criticized as reckless anti-cowboy, 197–98, 200, 202–3, 205–6; frontier myth fails to accommodate, 190–91, 194, 199–200, 202, 205–7, 216; frontier myth parameters pushed by, 187, 192, 194, 199–200; good-versus-evil rhetoric of, 179, 185, 187; nostalgic frontier myth vision of, 178, 209; and presidential election campaigns of 2000 and 2004, 182, 184; public’s initial enthusiasm and support for, 179, 185, 194–96, 198–99; public’s second-term rejection of, 197–98, 199, 206–7; racial views of, 181; regular-guy image of, 181–82; as RR’s Cowboy heir, 180–84, 183, 191, 200; TR self-comparisons of, 180, 200; tax cuts of, 182. See also Bush Doctrine; September 11 attacks; war on terror

Bush Doctrine, 192–94; American exceptionalism and, 194, 200; failure of, 199–200, 204–5; preemptive attacks, 192; premise of, 187, 199. See also unilateralism

Bush ranch. See Prairie Chapel Ranch (GWB)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 144

Calder, Jenni, 5–6

Califano, Joseph, 90, 93

Cam Ne, South Vietnam (CBS News report of 1965), 116

Campbell, Joseph, 3

Camp David, 144–45

Cannon, Lou, 144, 156, 173

captivity formula and Iran-Contra affair, 172

Carey, Chris, 183, 191

Caribbean Sea, 31–32

Carlson, Keith T., 8–9

Caro, Robert, 98, 105

Carson, Kit, 185, 186

Carter, Jimmy, 10, 103, 128–29, 156, 172, 175, 209; image as anti-frontiersman/-cowboy, 128–29, 135, 166, 173–74. See also election of 1976; election of 1980; Iranian hostage crisis

Castro, Fidel, 60

Cawelti, John, 186

Charge to Keep, A (Koerner painting), 190, 191

Cheney, Dick, 180–81, 191–92, 194, 204, 208

Chester, Edward W., 124

Cheyenne, Wyo., 15, 21, 130

Civil Rights Act of 1957, 65–66, 69, 83, 92

Civil Rights Act of 1964, 83, 92

civil rights movement, 58, 92, 120, 156. See also African Americans; Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1964; NAACP; racism; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Civil War, as watershed event, 24–25, 92, 219

Clinton, Bill, 178, 182, 210

Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 217; “cowboy diplomacy” quotation from, 203

Cody, Buffalo Bill, 26, 35, 160

Cold War, 58, 94, 192, 220; fears and related appeal of frontier myth, 59–60; frontier heroes, Westerns, and, 59–60; and RR’s shift in relations with the Soviets, 169–71. See also anticommunism; “Evil Empire” speech; Soviet Union

Collins, Michael L., 25

Colorado Springs, Colo., 30

communism. See anticommunism

Conkin, Paul, 123

conservation: business opponents of, 46; frontier myth and, 45–46, 48, 93; and irony of TR as big game hunter, 44, 48, 48; LBJ’s “New Conservation” program, 47, 93–94; LBJ and TR compared on, 47, 49, 63, 93–94; oil companies and GWB administration impact on, 208; RR’s rollback of, 94, 213; TR’s attitudes toward, 20, 43–49; TR’s cowboy persona and, 20; TR’s creation of federal park lands and, 45–46; TR’s link of American exceptionalism to, 45; TR speechmaking in support of, 45–46. See also “wilderness cult”; hunters and hunting; “When the G.O.P. Was Green” (Cronon)

Coolidge, Calvin, 58

Cooper, Gary, 177, 196–97

Cooper, John Milton, 20

“Cowboy Code” (Gene Autry), 105, 116, 205, 233n3

“cowboy diplomacy,” 38, 203

Cowboys & Indians magazine, 181

Crawford, Tex., 181, 188

Cronon, William, 45, 213

Cuba, 20, 27; Bay of Pigs invasion of, 62; revolution in, 60. See also Spanish-American War; Rough Riders

Dakota Territory, 16, 18, 23. See also North Dakota

Dalton, Kathleen, 38

Day After, The (film), 169–70; impact on RR’s views of nuclear weapons, 169–70, 177

Death Valley Days (TV show), 138

Deaver, Michael, 156

democracy, 121; LBJ’s ideas about, 75, 96–97; TR’s ideas about, 53, 54; Turner’s ideas about, 4, 96

Democratic National Convention of 1960, 68–69

Democratic National Convention of 1968, 120–21

deregulation, 149, 153, 158, 161–62, 181, 206, 210. See also financial crisis of 2008; savings and loan crisis

de Tocqueville, Alexis, 5

Dillon, Marshal Matt (Gunsmoke), 69, 71, 73, 202–3

Dippie, Brian W., 7–8, 11, 17, 55, 92. See also “Vanishing American” myth

“Dirty Harry” Callahan (Clint Eastwood), 141–42; and GWB’s approach to terrorism, 187–88; RR’s quoting of, 141, 161

Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts (Prown, ed.), 146

Divine, Robert A., 194

Dobrynin, Anatoly, 171

Dorsey, Leroy, 43

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick, dir.), 162

Dugger, Ronnie, 74, 107

Dyer, Thomas G., 39–40

Eastwood, Clint, 141, 187–88

Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, 159

Economist, 182–83, 184

economy, 128, 135, 175; employment and inflation, 128, 159–60; national debt, 159–60, 183; taxation, 159, 182–83

Edel, Wilbur, 144

Education Bill of 1965, 75

effeminacy, 42, 50, 112

Egan, Timothy, 195

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 60, 67, 94, 212

election of 1900, 26–27

election of 1904, 50

election of 1960, 69–71, 70

election of 1964, 81–87; Democratic Party platform and, 84–85; LBJ outcowboys Goldwater in, 86–87, 99, 148; LBJ’s mandate from, 87–88; and “reasonable” cowboy LBJ vs. “kooky” cowboy Goldwater campaign images, 83–85, 85, 135

election of 1968, 126

election of 1976, 128

election of 1980, 134–35, 135, 148, 155, 184

election of 1984, 152–53, 160, 173–74

election of 2000, 182, 184

election of 2004, 184, 198–99

Eliade, Mircea, 3

“End of Cowboy Diplomacy, The” (Time), 203

“End of the Trail, The” (LBJ cartoon), 125

Enron Corporation and relationship with GWB administration, 180

environmentalism. See conservation

Erhard, Ludwig, 77, 198

events, impact of. See hinge, the

event-structure dynamic, 8–9, 11–13, 103, 115, 130, 148–49, 172, 177, 209, 213, 216, 235n33. See also Carlson, Keith T.; Sahlins, Marshall

“Evil Empire,” speech (RR), 166, 171, 219

Fallaci, Oriana, 126

Faludi, Susan, 197

Faragher, John Mack, 9, 208

Fascist Gun in the West, The (poster), 141

federal government, role of, 6, 217; conservative views of, 81–82, 136, 138–39, 153–54, 205; liberal views of, 9, 12, 49, 50–52, 84, 88–89, 91, 124

Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, 154

Fehrenbach, Theodore Reed (T. R.), 109–10

Feldman, Stanley, 170

financial crisis of 2008, 205–6, 209–10

Fisher, Beth, 169

Fisher, Walter R., 131

Ford, Gerald, 103, 127–28, 131, 175

Ford, John, 144

Fort Carson, Colo., 185–86, 186

Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, 60, 61

Freund, John G., 165

frontier, official closing of (1891), 2, 9, 11–12, 17, 222n15

frontier, use of term, 6, 119, 150–52, 208

frontier myth, 1–6, 219–20; black hat–white hat dichotomy of, 31, 58, 107, 164–65, 165, 187, 219; and bonanza economic development, 5, 46, 74, 108, 158; civilization-vs.-savagery feature of, 1, 5–6, 58, 74–75, 107, 115–16, 178, 184–85, 218; conservative limits of, 85–86, 200–202, 205, 209–10; conservatives, association with, 11, 210, 223n28; conservative vision of, 10, 136–37; constraining influence on presidents, 10–13, 124, 205; current state of limbo and future of, 210, 213, 215, 218–20; dark side of, 125, 129; declining conservative version of, 11, 200–207, 216; deployment (in general) by presidents of, 6, 11–12, 29–30, 122, 208–10, 218; elasticity of, 6–7, 11–12, 14, 219; historical inaccuracy of, 4, 87, 145–46; individualism-vs.–community/inclusiveness aspects of, 5–6, 12, 30, 42, 65, 136–37, 209, 215–16; influence of on cowboy presidents, 8, 117–18; influence on culture and self-identity of, 3–4, 9, 122; liberal interpretive framework of, 9–10, 12, 29–30, 87, 99–100, 122; liberal failure of, 10, 12–13, 102–3, 122, 124–26, 129–30; and liberals rejection of since RR, 162, 194, 203, 207, 216; as national phenomenon, 3–4, 17, 22, 24–25, 28, 42, 46, 66, 69–70, 73, 77, 84, 86–87, 100, 198, 215; vs. Old Europe, 2, 4; optimism of, 6, 17, 90, 96, 100, 132, 150, 190, 209–10; progress (forward-looking) vs. nostalgia (backward) aspects of, 5, 7, 10, 13, 215–16; projection onto the world of, 106–7, 113–15, 187; protection of public good and, 13, 21, 46; reasserted liberal version of, 62–65, 122, 197–98; remission of (1970s), 103, 127, 129. See also American exceptionalism; event-structure dynamic; frontier, use of term; hinge, the; Sagebrush Rebellion; Turner thesis (Frederick Jackson Turner)

frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as foremost heroes of TR era, 31, 35

frontier thesis. See Turner thesis (Frederick Jackson Turner)

frontier women, as described by TR, 43

Fulton, Charles, 46

Gable, John, 41

Gaddis, John Lewis, 198

Garn–St. Germain Act of 1982, 158

Germany, 31–32, 58, 65, 198

Gingrich, Newt, 212

Glenn, John, 95

Goldberg, Robert A., 82–83, 223n28

Goldwater, Barry, 81–87, 99, 148, 180, 215; conservative cowboy persona of, 81–82, 82; ill-matched to mid-twentieth-century frontier myth, 81–83, 85–86, 181; portrayed as “kooky” cowboy vs. “responsible” LBJ, 83–86, 85, 146, 162; RR and, 132–33, 135, 137, 148, 150, 151, 153, 162–63, 215

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 143, 164, 168, 170–71

Gore, Al, 182, 184

Graebner, Norman, 35

Graham, Billy, 94

Grant, Madison, 41–42

Great Depression, 58

Great Society, 10, 88; and education as equalizer, 75; perceived failure of, 12, 119, 124; “Stretching It Around the World” cartoon, 114–15; Vietnam and the, 119, 124–25; western frontier symbolism and, 57, 80, 90–91

Great White Fleet, 33–34, 37

Grenada, US invasion of, 163–64

Gromyko, Andrei, 170

Grossman, Ron, 193

Gun Control Act of 1968, 92–93

Gunsmoke (TV show), 71, 229n6

Haig, Alexander, 166

Hanna, Mark, 26

Hanson, Victor Davis, 203

Harding, Warren G., 54, 58

Hawaii, 20, 32

Hearst, William Randolph, 48

heroes, 28, 31; absence of during 1970s, 127; of LBJ, 63–64, 111–12; of RR, 145; of TR, 31, 52

Heston, Charlton, 92–93

High Noon (film), 177, 193, 196–97

Hightower, Jim, 131

Hill Country: Lyndon Johnson’s Texas, The (film), 74–75, 90

hinge, the, 12–14, 103, 136–37, 213; and collapse of liberal frontier myth, 12, 100–103, 122, 124–26, 129, 133, 136–37, 176; dichotomy within, 13, 137, 215; internal impact of events on frontier myth and vice versa, 148–49; LBJ and GWB parallels within, 11, 13–14, 179, 193–94, 200, 205, 208–10; and rise of conservative frontier myth, 12–13, 130–31, 136–37, 146–47, 174, 176; watershed period of (1968–80), 10, 13, 200, 205, 208–10

Ho Chi Minh, 113

Hoover, Herbert, 58, 81, 135

Horton, Scott, 190

Humphrey, Hubert, 98, 112, 121, 126

hunters and hunting: and apparent contradiction with conservation, 49; and portrayals of LBJ, 79–80; TR’s exploits, 18, 19, 44, 48, 48; TR’s ideas about, 20, 49

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (TR), 21

Hurricane Katrina, 179, 205–6, 209

Hussein, Saddam, 185, 193, 195, 198, 204

incarceration rate (US), 161

Indigenous peoples. See Native Americans

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 171

International Criminal Court, 193

Iran-Contra affair, 149, 172

Iranian hostage crisis, 10, 103, 128, 131, 172, 209

Iraq War, 13; casualties of, 201, 204; coalition of the willing and, 185–86, 191, 196; corporate interests in, 208; domestic response to, 194–99; expectation over-reach of, 194; and frontier myth failure for GWB, 11, 197–201; frontier myth transformed by, 187, 200, 202; GWB’s cowboy-speak and, 185; Indian war metaphor and, 185; internal Iraqi division from, 201–2, 204; international criticism of, 196–98, 206, 246n70; “mission accomplished” incident during, 190–91, 209; parallels and differences with Vietnam War, 185, 193, 200–201, 205; weapons of mass destruction and, 191, 201, 205, 206, 208. See also atrocities; Hussein, Saddam

James, Frank, 54

Japan and Japanese, 36, 38, 58, 196, 246n70; economic resurgence of, 103, 140

Jefferson, Thomas, 17, 27

Joey Bishop Show, The (TV program), 93

Johnson, Claudia Alta (Lady Bird), 70–71, 112, 118

Johnson, Lynda Bird (daughter), 107

Johnson, Lyndon B., 6, 9, 12–14, 30, 55, 134, 137, 140, 143, 146, 174, 209, 215–16, 219; as accidental frontier president replacing Harvard JFK, 71–72; Alamo syndrome and, 102, 110–12, 117; American exceptionalism and, 46, 96, 109, 113; birthplace story of, 105; civilization vs. savagery in family stories of, 74, 106–7; civil rights and, 65–67, 69, 91–92; community and inclusion emphasis of, 69, 78, 84, 91, 94, 100; cowboy colossus, 62, 98–101; credibility gap of, 13, 76, 104–6, 111; decision not to seek reelection, 121; defines America in frontier terms, 73, 78, 89–90, 122, 235–36n33; family connections to frontier myth, 74, 107–9; frontier myth and popularity levels of, 87–88, 122; frontier myth projected onto world, 106–7, 113–15; guns-and-butter approach of, 9–10, 107–8, 108; Hill Country foreign policy of, 107, 109–10; and ideas of frontier mission in the world, 102, 104, 109, 113–16, 120, 193; as JFK’s cowboy running mate, 69, 70; liberal frontier values of, 69, 80–81, 84–85, 88–90, 99–100, 102; masculinity ideal of, 79, 112–13; as national frontier leader, 71–73, 88–89; obituaries (1973) and tragic legacy of, 123–25; optimism and forward thinking of, 7, 13, 72, 85, 88, 89–90, 102, 143, 159; public rejection of (1968), 129; relationship with the press, 67, 102, 107, 209; remade as westerner (no longer southerner), 64–69, 86; “responsible” cowboy image of (1964), 84–85, 87; southern backlash against “westerner” LBJ, 68–69, 230n19; TR as hero and role model of, 55, 63–64, 99; Turner thesis and, 65, 72, 73, 75, 77, 96, 113; Vietnam and frontier myth connections made by, 107–9, 113; and Vietnam failure of, 102, 104, 117–18, 125–26. See also election of 1964; Goldwater, Barry; Great Society; Johnson, Lyndon B., as outdoor sportsman; LBJ Ranch; Vietnam War

Johnson, Lyndon B., as outdoor sportsman, 49, 79–80; exaggerated media comparisons of TR with, 79

Johnson, Samuel (father), 111

John Wayne’s America (Wills), 133–34

Kane, Will (High Noon), 193, 196, 197. See also Cooper, Gary

Karsh, Yousuf, 82

Kazin, Michael, 217

Kearns, Doris, 107

Keller, Bill, 182

Kelly, Jack, 193

Kennedy, John F., 63, 68, 71, 72; foreign policy of, 62; masculinity mocked by LBJ, 112; New Frontier and, 60–62; “no cowpuncher,” 60, 69; speech to Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, 60, 61; and TR parallels, 61–62

Kennedy, Robert F., 120

Khadafi, Muammar, 164

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 42, 120, 123

Kissinger, Henry, 126–27

Koerner, Wilhelm Heinrich Detlev, 190

Koizumi, Junichiro, 188, 196

Korean Airlines Flight 007, 164, 169

Korean Conflict, 109, 117

Korean Demilitarized Zone, 150–52

Ku Klux Klan, 41, 112

Kyoto Accord, 193

Lane, Franklin E., 34

Laxalt, Paul, 171

LBJ Ranch, 63, 72–78, 110; BBQ-at-the-Ranch events re-created across the country, 73, 76–78; compared with other presidential ranches, 74; “The Fandango” at, 77–78, 78; media coverage of, 67; plugged into “West as America” nostalgia, 73, 76–78; as symbol of LBJ’s self-identity and persona, 66–67, 71–72, 80, 110; technological frontiers and, 73, 97, 98

Lebanon: Beirut bombing of Marine barracks, 149, 164, 173, 173, 205; Iran-Contra scandal, 172

Legacy of Conquest, The (Patricia Limerick), 204

Lehrer, Tom, 162

“Let’s Make America Great Again,” slogan: Donald Trump’s altered adoption of, 217; RR’s use of, 7, 136, 139

Life magazine, 25, 26, 59

Limerick, Patricia, 39, 204. 209

Lincoln, Abraham, 52

Little Missouri River, 18

Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, 21

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 18, 41

Lone Ranger, 166, 192, 196, 203

Longworth, Alice Lee Roosevelt (daughter of TR), 18, 55

Lutz, Wayne, 195

Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President (film), 90

Magnificent Seven, The (film), 163, 193

Maine (battleship), 24, 224n16

Manifest Destiny, 5, 17, 35, 61, 169

Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (film), 144

Marine One, 98

Marlboro Country, 140–41

masculinity: LBJ and, 64, 79, 112–13; RR and, 141, 147, 157, 173–74; TR and, 21, 24, 43, 45, 49. See also effeminacy; frontier myth; “Strenuous Life, The” (TR)

Masterson, Bat, 54

Matthews, Chris, 195

McCain, John, 217

McKinley, William, 26–27, 30, 69, 217

McNamara, Robert, 102, 105

McNelly, Leander Harvey (L. H.), 89, 110

McVeigh, Stephen, 178

media, 102, 109; changing nature of, 104–5, 116

Medicare Act, 53, 174

Medora, N.Dak., 18

“melting pot” idea, 12, 22–23, 41, 55

Meyers, Marvin, 5

Minutaglio, Bill, 180

Miroff, Bruce, 126

Missing in Action series (films), 172

mission, 102; contradictions in Iraq, 201; contradictions in Vietnam, 118, 125; failure in Iraq, 210; failure in Vietnam, 120; sense of, 17, 195–96. See also American exceptionalism; Manifest Destiny

Mondale, Walter, 174

Morgan, Piers, 198

Morning in America (film), 139, 150–52, 160, 174

Morris, Edmund, 21, 180

Moscow, USSR, 157

Moyers, Bill, 3, 158

“Mrs. Robinson” (Simon and Garfunkel), 127

Muir, John, 43, 47

Murdoch, David H., 145, 219

My Lai massacre, South Vietnam, 116

myth, definition and significance of, 3, 7–8. See also frontier myth; “Vanishing American” myth

myth of invincibility, 117, 120, 125

NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Nash, Gerald D., 4, 87

Nash, Roderick, 44

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 68, 175

National Association of Broadcasters, 209

National Association of Evangelicals, 164–65

National Cattleman’s Beef Association, 187

National Review, 195; response to TR, 216–17

Native Americans: RR attitudes and policies toward, 157; in Rough Riders, 24, 40; TR’s attitudes toward, 2, 22, 39–42. See also under frontier myth; Iraq War; “Vanishing American” myth; Vietnam War

Neuharth, Al, 205

New Deal, 58, 86, 88, 141

New Federalism, 154

New Frontier, 60–62, 69, 166

New Nationalism, 18, 21, 52–53; TR’s frontier publications and, 21; TR speech at Osawatomie, Kans. (1910), 52–53. See also Obama, Barack

New Orleans, La., 91

Newsweek, 68, 77, 123, 211–12

New Western History, 4, 39; gains traction, 203–4; RR’s counterthrust against, 145. See also Limerick, Patricia; White, Richard

New York, N.Y., 18, 23, 128, 184

New York Times, 71, 129, 140, 154, 189–90, 197

9/11. See September 11 attacks

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 59

Nixon, Richard M., 70, 103, 126–28, 131, 212

North Dakota, 18, 31. See also Dakota Territory

North Korea, 121, 203

nuclear weapons and arms control: Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, 193; Barry Goldwater as “trigger happy” cowboy, 83–85, 85, 162–63; Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 170–71; “nuclear cowboy” (RR), 162–63; RR’s anxiety over reoriented, 169–71; RR’s “peace through strength” philosophy and, 163. See also Day After, The (film); Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

Obama, Barack, 217; limited use of frontier myth by, 210, 214–15, 214; and speech about TR at Osawatomie, Kans. (2011), 213–14

“Obamacare” (Affordable Care Act), 217

oil industry, 203, 243n10; and Iraq War, 208

“Old Europe,” 4, 195–96, 200

OPEC oil boycott, 128, 139, 212

Osawatomie, Kans., 52, 213

Panama Canal, 166; construction of, 31–33; and cowboy TR’s celebrity status in Panama, 33

Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, 34

Parker, Kathleen, 195–96

Pedernales River, 97, 110

Pett, Saul, 125

Philippines, American annexation of, 20, 38

Pinchot, Gifford, 93

polarization of Democrats and Republicans, 14, 175, 212–13, 217, 220

Pomeroy, Earl S., 4, 5, 204, 219, 222n15

popular culture, 59. See also titles of individual films, novels, songs, and TV programs

Porter, David M., 165

Portland, Ore., 86

“Practicability of Equalizing Men and Women before the Law, The” (TR), 42–43

Prairie Chapel Ranch (GWB), 188–90; compared with Rancho del Cielo, 181, 188, 189–90; entertaining of friendly dignitaries at, 188–89; lack of cowboy authenticity at, 74, 180, 189–90; promoting visual cowboy GWB at, 188–90; time spent by GWB at, 188

President of Good and Evil, The (Singer), 187

Price, B. Byron, 60

Profiles in Courage (JFK): western heroes in, 60

Progressive (Bull Moose) Party, 40–41, 53

Prouder, Better, Stronger (film). See Morning in America (film)

Pryor, Richard “Cactus,” 76–77

public opinion polls. See approval ratings

Pueblo incident, 121, 121

Putin, Vladimir, 188–89

race riots, 10, 118–19, 122–23

racism, 22–23, 40–41, 92, 156, 201

Rambo series (films), 141, 172, 198

ranches. See LBJ Ranch; Prairie Chapel Ranch (GWB); Rancho del Cielo (RR)

Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (TR), 20–21, 53

Rancho del Cielo (RR), 142–43, 159; Mikhail Gorbachev visit to, 143, 171; and symbolic contrasts with LBJ Ranch, 74, 142–43; tasks RR performed at, 142, 189

Rattenbury, Richard C., 19

Reagan, Nancy, 171

Reagan, Ronald, 7, 10, 58, 74, 76, 99, 179, 182, 183, 186, 189, 198, 200, 204–5, 210, 212, 217; American exceptionalism and, 152, 163, 173; anti–big government rhetoric of, 10, 130, 132–33, 136, 139, 153; anti-Soviet views of, 142, 149, 153, 162–66, 165, 171; backward-looking nostalgia of, 7, 12–13, 131, 133–34, 136–39, 143, 152, 159; Barry Goldwater style contrasts with, 132–33, 135, 150, 151; civil rights indifference of, 156, 174–75; conservative frontier values of, 10, 13, 130–34, 138–39, 152, 174; cowboy hero image of, 131, 133, 138–41, 166, 175, 210–12; criticisms of, 141, 161–62, 173–74, 204; criticisms of “weak” Jimmy Carter and liberals by, 131–32, 134–36, 135, 139–40, 147, 153, 160, 164, 166; deregulation under, 133, 153, 158, 161–62; early movie and political career of, 137–38, 141; exclusionary views of, 10, 149, 150, 154, 156–57, 175, 204; frontier myth benefits for, 140–41, 175; frontier myth constraints on, 149, 155, 172–74, 173; and

Reagan, Ronald (continued) frontier myth Hollywood preferences over historical West, 143–46, 176; frontier myth ties to persona of, 137–38, 176; hawkish foreign policy of, 162–66, 170; Hollywood Westerns influence on, 137–38, 140, 144–45; ignorance of, 157–58, 162; increase in spending and size of federal government by, 159–60, 174; individualism emphasis of, 133, 136–37, 151–54, 156, 175; law and order theme, 161; as LBJ’s antithesis, 133–36, 138–40, 143, 146–48, 215; legacy among liberals of, 174–75, 210, 212; masculinity of, 140, 149, 152, 172–73; maverick outsider image of, 131, 140–41, 154–55; military buildup by, 134, 149, 159, 163; nuclear anxieties of, 169–70; optimism of, 132–33, 150, 174; as post-GWB Republicans’ cowboy icon, 13–14, 176, 201, 207, 210–12, 211; racial views of, 155–57, 174–75; and revised version of frontier myth, 139–42, 160; Soviets, 169–71; tax cuts and increases by, 149, 158–61, 174–75; as “Teflon president,” 173–74. See also election of 1980; election of 1984; Iran-Contra affair; “Let’s Make America Great Again,” slogan; Morning in America (film); Rancho del Cielo; Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

Reagan, Ronald, symbolism of Second Inaugural Address (1985), 158–59

Reagan ranch. See Rancho del Cielo (RR)

Reagan Ranch Center Museum, 171

Reagan Revolution, 103, 126, 130–31, 182

Reedy, George, 79, 199–20

Regan, Donald, 172

regulation, 12, 50, 52–53, 216. See also deregulation

Remington, Frederic, 35, 41, 174

Republican National Convention of 1976, 131

Republican National Convention of 1984, 150. See also Morning in America (film)

Republican National Convention of 1988, 176

Richards, Ann, 180

Rich Nations, Poor Nations (Wood), 115

Robinson, Jerry, 168–69, 168

Rockwell, Norman, 174

Roddenberry, Gene, 95–96

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 55, 58, 112

Roosevelt, Theodore, 9, 11, 51, 61, 77, 79, 93, 99, 171, 180, 215–16; accidental presidency of, 17, 26, 27; on American exceptionalism, 17, 22, 26, 28, 35; appeal to all classes, 21, 23, 28; and collectivism vs. individualism, 15, 20–21, 52–54; conservation and, 43–49, 50, 53, 213; as cowboy rancher, hero, and icon, 16, 17–21, 23, 25, 28–35, 45, 63–64; Democratic and Republican twenty-first-century opinions about, 213–14, 216–17; democratic egalitarian ideas of, 18, 21, 45; early career of, 26, 30–31; early life and transformation out west, 16, 18–21, 19, 23, 49; extended frontier strategy of, 34–35; on federal government vs. business power, 12, 49–52; foreign policy of, 20, 22, 30, 32–39; frontier experience and modernization of military by, 22, 30–32; and frontier myth, 15–16; as shaper of frontier myth and western industry, 2–3, 18, 21–23, 29–30, 49, 55–56; and Great White Fleet, 33–34, 37; on government, role of, 9, 12, 16, 30, 49–52, 58; hawkish vs. dove image, 31–32, 36–39, 37, 171; hunting exploits of, 18, 19, 44, 48, 48; masculinity and, 21, 24, 45; maturing ideas of, 21, 39, 41; “melting pot” ideas of, 10, 12, 22–23, 41, 224n10; Nobel Peace Prize for mediation of Russo-Japanese War, 38–39, 52; optimism of, 2–3, 23, 29; pioneer principles and, 15, 21, 29–30; and “Powers That Prey,” 30; and private vs. public interest, 16–17, 52–54; progressivism of, 9, 15, 23, 52, 55, 216–17; race, views on, 2, 21–24, 39–42; racism of, 22, 39, 40–41; radicalism of, 46, 52–54; “reasonable” cowboy president, 36–39, 52, 171; as Renaissance man, 27–28, 180; rejection of social Darwinism by, 39–40, 50–51; “speak softly and carry a big stick” philosophy of, 102, 121, 200; technological frontiers embraced by, 33–35; on Turner thesis, 2–3, 22, 39; twenty-first-century relevance of, 51–52; vice presidency of, 26–27, 27; on women’s rights and gender roles, 42–43. See also conservation; election of 1900; election of 1904; New Nationalism; Panama Canal; Progressive (Bull Moose) Party; Rough Riders; “Strenuous Life, The,” (TR); “wilderness cult”; Winning of the West, The, series (TR).

Rosenberg, Charles, 7

Rothman, Hal K., 78

Rough Riders, 24–26, 38; as American microcosm, 24, 40; charge up San Juan (Kettle) Hill, 16, 25–26, 63, 217; media coverage of, 25–26; and “Teddy the Terror,” 25–26, 25; and TR’s changing ideas about race, 24, 40, 42. See also Wood, Leonard

Rowe, Elizabeth, 70

Rumsfeld, Donald, 195–96; visit to Fort [Kit] Carson, 185–86, 186

Rusher, Janice Hocker, 3

Russell, Richard, 65–66

Russia, 38. See also Putin, Vladimir; Soviet Union

Safer, Morley, 116

Said, Edward, 179

Sagebrush Rebellion, 149, 154–55

Sahlins, Marshall, 74, 170; event-structure relationship described by, 8–9, 11–13, 17, 35, 103, 132–33, 148–49, 183, 187, 209, 216

Saigon, South Vietnam, 116–17, 120; fall of, 10, 128

San Antonio, Tex., 63, 110

San Juan Hill charge. See under Rough Riders

Santa Barbara, Calif., 142, 171

Saturday Evening Post, 190, 67

savings and loan crisis, 158, 161–62

SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

September 11 attacks, 11, 178, 184, 195; Bush’s cowboy-speak response to, 178, 184–85; frontier myth’s informing of, 185, 187; impact on frontier myth structure, 184, 192; savagery vs. civilization theme applied to, 178. See also war on terror

Shane (film), 193, 199

Shultz, George, 171–72

Sidey, Hugh, 105, 109, 117

Siegel, George W., 67–68

Sigelman, Lee, 170

“Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner). See Turner thesis

Simon and Garfunkel, 127

Singer, Peter, 187

“Slipper Tongue, The” (short story), 190

Slotkin, Richard, 5, 22, 118, 172

Smith, Geoff, 203

social Darwinism rejected by TR, 39–40, 50–51

Soviet Union: American Cold War image of, 58–60, 94–95; RR hostility toward, 164–66; RR shift toward negotiation with, 169–71. See also anticommunism; Cold War; “Evil Empire” speech (RR); Gorbachev, Mikhail; nuclear weapons and arms control

space exploration, 62, 94–97; and Cold War, 94–95, 166; LBJ’s freedom vs. RR’s free enterprise in, 95–96, 168; and LBJ’s relating to frontier myth and pioneering, 95–97, 129, 232n58

Space Force, 218

Spanish-American War, 24, 63. See also Cuba; Philippines, American annexation of; Rough Riders

Sputnik, 94–95

Square Deal, 50, 53, 64

Stallone, Sylvester, 141

Star Trek (original TV series), 95, 218; and LBJ’s space pioneers rhetoric, 95–96

“Star Wars” program. See Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

Statler Brothers, 127

Stevenson, Adlai, I, 27

Stevenson, Adlai, II, 77, 112

Stewart, Jon, 188

Stockman, David, 175

Stonewall, Tex., 78, 142

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 144, 149, 166–69, 174; equated with gunfighter RR, 168–69, 168; free enterprise frontier aspect of, 168; frontier optimism of, 166–69. See also nuclear weapons and arms control

“Strenuous Life, The” (TR), 24, 112, 224n15

Taft, William H., 52–53

Taliban, 186, 202, 208

Tea Party, 212

technological frontiers: and American expansion, 33–35; at LBJ ranch, 97; Panama Canal, 33; pioneer spirit and, 34–35; and space exploration, 6, 96–97; and TR-era inventions, 34

television, westerns on, 59, 229n6

Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King (film), 48

Tet Offensive, 120

Texas and Texans, 110; GWB’s efforts to be “more Texan,” 180; Hill Country, 64, 73, 75, 107; transition from Democratic to Republican stronghold, 176–77

Texas Rangers, The (foreword by LBJ), 88–89, 96, 110

Third Armored Cavalry Guard, 185, 186

Thoreau, Henry David, 43

“Time for Choosing, A” (RR), 156

Time magazine, 203, 211

Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 200, 208

torture. See atrocities

Travis, William Barrett, 110, 112

Treaty of Portsmouth, 38

Trump, Donald, 220; compared with GWB, 217–18; divisive presidency of, 14, 215, 217–18

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 9, 116, 125; comparison to TR, 4, 22, 39; ideas about democracy, 2, 4, 45, 75, 113; premises of ideas, 4–5; role in frontier myth, 4–5, 22. See also Turner thesis (Frederick Jackson Turner)

Turner thesis (Frederick Jackson Turner), 1–3, 11–12, 140; on American character and democracy, 2, 4, 22, 195; influence on American history writing, 4,9, 203–4; historical errors in, 4; LBJ’s references to, 65, 96, 113; and process of social evolution of, 1–2; RR’s image and, 152; TR’s response to, 2–3, 22, 39. See also New Western History; Pomeroy, Earl S.

Twilight of the Presidency, The (George Reedy), 119

Udall, Stewart, 93, 112–13

unilateralism: of Bush Doctrine, 192–93, 199, 200; RR and, 153

United Nations, Iraq War and the, 192–93

Valenti, Jack, 83–84, 92

“Vanishing American” myth, 8, 11, 119, 125, 146, 222–23n23

Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, The (Dippie), 222–23n23

Vietnam War, 60, 177; Alamo metaphor for, 102, 111; atrocities of, 116; bombing of North Vietnam, 107; and decline of frontier myth, 102–3, 106, 118; failure of, 10, 12, 105, 108, 108, 118; Great Society and, 105, 114, 119, 124–25; Indian war metaphors for, 107, 125; and LBJ’s connections to frontier myth, 107–9, 113, 117–18; race riots and, 118; Tet Offensive, 120; as transformative event, 102–3, 111, 118; unpopularity and antiwar sentiment of, 105, 106, 107, 115, 118; westerns interpretation of, 107. See also My Lai massacre; Saigon, South Vietnam; Tonkin Gulf Resolution

Virginian, The (Wister), 19, 28–29, 44, 72, 98, 187, 225nn25–26

von Braun, Wernher, 95

Voting Rights Act of 1965, 91–92, 94, 119

Wallace, George, 121

Walters, Barbara, 202

war on poverty, 75–76; and LBJ’s bid to apply it to Vietnam and the world, 114–15

war on terror: as contest of good vs. evil, 179, 185–87; and GWB’s western rhetoric and visuals, 178–79, 184–86; Prairie Chapel Ranch as backdrop for, 190. See also bin Laden, Osama; Iraq War; September 11 attacks

Washington, Booker T., 40–41

Washington, D.C., 75, 171, 176, 181, 189, 189

Washington Post, 15, 79, 86, 171, 188

Watergate scandal, 10, 126–28

Watt, James, 154–55

Watterson, Henry, 26

Wayne, John, 73, 133, 144, 176, 187, 190, 197–98

Webb, Walter Prescott, 88, 97, 110, 221–22n9

Weinberger, Caspar, 172

Welter, Rush, 7–8, 92

West, Elliot, 5, 7, 39

West, Mark, 183, 191

West, the: idea of, 3, 17, 24, 55, 57, 68, 87, 89; as trendsetter, 64–65, 87

westerns, 23, 73; GWB administration and, 193–94; on hiatus during the 1970s, 127; RR and, 137–38, 144–45, 237n12; TV ratings for 1959, 59, 229n6. See also titles of specific films, novels, and TV shows

Westmoreland, William, 208

West of the Imagination, The (Goetzmann and Goetzmann), 57

“Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?” (Statler Brothers), 127

“When the G.O.P. Was Green” (Cronon), 213

White, G. Edward, 3

White, Richard, 4, 39, 155, 203, 222n15

White, William Allen, 54

“Who’s Next?” (Lehrer), 162

Wicker, Tom, 71, 99

“wilderness cult,” 3, 20, 43–45

wilderness movement, 3, 20, 43–45, 47

Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Brinkley), 44, 54

Wills, Gary, 133, 166

Winning of the West, The, series (TR), 2, 5, 21–22, 25, 31, 39–40, 49, 53; role of women in, 43

Wister, Owen, 19, 28, 35, 41, 44, 72. See also Virginian, The (Wister)

women, 175; TR’s view of, 42–43. See also women’s suffrage

women’s suffrage, 42

Wood, Leonard, 25

World War I, 41–42

World War II, 38, 58–60, 65, 109, 111

Wyoming, 21, 72, 130

Yosemite Valley, Calif., 47

Zangwill, Israel, 22, 41