Gunfighter nation 1. Gunfighter nation 2. >$^G.□a 3. BOSTON PUBLIC LlBl^RY 4. Table of Contents 5. Introduction 6. Regeneration Through Violence: The Language oj the Myth 7. The Frontier Myth as a Theory of Development 8. 'Trogressives” and ''Populists*’ 9. 1 The Winning of the West 10. The Historian as Hunter 11. The Winning of the West: A Progressive Myth of Origins 12. Recovering the Frontier: Regeneration Through Imperialism 13. The White City and the Wild West 14. Mob, Tribe, and Regiment 15. ''1008 Dead Niggers'’: The Logic of Massacre 16. Mythologies of Resistance 17. The Pinkerton Detective: Hawkeye Among the Communists 18. The Outlaw/Detective: Heroic Style as Ideology 19. The Significances of Dime-Novel Populism 20. Aristocracy of Violence 21. Recovering the Savage: Remington, 22. London, Garland 23. The Virginian (1902) and the Myth of the Vigilante 24. Democracy or Civilization: Dixon’s The Clansman (1904) 25. The Political Uses oj Symbolic Violence 26. From the Open Range to the Mean Streets 27. Zane Grey: The Formula Western, 1911—1925 28. The Virginian in Nighttown: Origins of the Hard-boiled Detective, 1910—1940 29. PART III 30. Cinematic Form and Mythographic Function: Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) 31. Icons of Authenticity: The Movie Star as Progressive Hero 32. The Epic Western, 1923—1931 33. The Studio System, the Depression, and the Eclipse of the Western, 1930—1938 34. The Two-Gun Man of the Twenties: Gangster Films, 1931-1939 35. The Worldscale Western, 'Wictorian Empire'' 36. Movies, 1935—1940 37. “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch . . . Westerns, 1931-1939 38. The Western Is American History, 1939—1941 39. The Renaissance of the Feature Western 40. The Cult of the Outlaw 41. The Apotheosis of the “B” Western: John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) 42. Last Stands and Lost Patrols 43. ’ ■ ‘ ’■-‘'■‘•intw'i 44. PART 45. Cult of the Indian: Devil’s Doorway and Broken Arrow (1950) 46. 57)- 47. Killer Elite 48. High Noon (1952): The Hero in Spite of Democracy 49. A Good Man with a Gun: Shane (1953) 50. The Gunfighter Mystique 51. Imagining Third World Revolutions 52. Coloring the Looking-Glass: Mexico as Mythic Space, 1912—1952 53. The &quot;Zapata Problem&quot;: The Strong Man Makes a Weak People 54. The Man Who Knows Communists: The Heroic Style oj Covert Operations (1953—54) 55. Fast Guns for '‘Zapata'*: The Counterinsurgency Scenario and Vera Cruz (1954) 56. 14 57. Search and Rescue/ Search and Destroy: The Indian-Hater as Counterguerrilla 58. The Magnificent Seven (1960) and the Counterinsurgency Paradox 59. i: 60. Conquering New Frontiers 61. John Wayne Syndrome: The Cult of ''The Duke” 62. Blockbuster Tactics: The Green Berets (1968) and the Big-Unit War 63. Attrition 64. Recovering the Mission: Mexico Westerns, 65. 1965-1968 66. Cross-over Point 67. The Demoralization of the Western: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) 68. Lunatic Semiology: The Demoralization of American Culture, 1969—1973 69. Conclusion: 70. The Crisis of Public Myth 71. Back in the Saddle Again?: The Reagan Presidency and the Recrudescence of the Myth 72. Imagining America 73. List of Abbreviations 74. Vf j&,.r,V 4 l 75. Notes 76. Notes to Chapter 4 77. Notes to Chapter 5 78. Notes to Chapter 6 79. Notes to Chapter 7 80. Notes to Chapter 8 81. Notes to Chapter 9 82. Notes to Chapter 10 83. Notes to Chapter 11 84. Notes to Chapter 12 85. Notes to Chapter 13 86. Notes to Chapter 14 87. Notes to Chapter 15 88. Notes to Chapter 16 89. Notes to Chapter 17 90. Notes to Conclusion 91. 764 92. 765 93. Bibliography 94. 784 95. []. 96. 33 - 6 - 97. Selected Filmography 98. Index 99. 834 100. S35 101. 836 102. S3 7 103. 8s8 Gunfighter nation Richard Slotkin This book was produced in EPUB format by the Internet Archive. The book pages were scanned and converted to EPUB format automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and is somewhat susceptible to errors. The book may not offer the correct reading sequence, and there may be weird characters, non-words, and incorrect guesses at structure. Some page numbers and headers or footers may remain from the scanned page. The process which identifies images might have found stray marks on the page which are not actually images from the book. The hidden page numbering which may be available to your ereader corresponds to the numbered pages in the print edition, but is not an exact match; page numbers will increment at the same rate as the corresponding print edition, but we may have started numbering before the print book's visible page numbers. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this book will be useful to you. The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library and to promote universal access to all knowledge. The Archive's purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages, and provides specialized services for information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. Created with abbyy2epub (v.1.6.9) >$^G.□a >$51.15 IN CANADA O n July 16, 1960, John F. Kennedy came to _the podium of the Los Angeles Coliseum to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination as candidate for President. As is customary in American political oratory, Kennedy used his acceptance speech to provide a slogan that would characterize his administration’s style of thought and action. “I stand tonight facing West on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West....[But] the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won, and we stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” By invoking the Frontier as a symbol to trademark his candidacy, Kennedy also tapped into one of the most resonant and persistent American myths. As Richard Slotkin shows in this extraordinarily informed and wide-ranging new book, the myth of the Frontier has been perhaps the most pervasive influence behind American culture and politics in this century. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America brings to completion a distinguished trilogy of books that includes The Fatal Environment and the award-winning Regeneration Through Violence. Beginning in 1893 at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago with Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous address on the closing of the American frontier and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Slotkin examines the transformation from history to myth of events like Custer’s last stand and explores the myriad and fundamental ways the myth influences American culture and politics. Although Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” became the dominant interpretation of our national experience among academic historians, it was the racialist theory of history (the ascendancy and superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race), embodied in Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West that was most influential in popular culture and government policy-making over the course of this century. The explicit assumptions about race and civilization (Continued on hack flap) No ioiiger fee* property of the Bostor? Library. Sate of this material benefite ti© Lsferar/ BOSTON PUBLIC LlBl^RY Books by Richard Slotkin FICTION The Return of Henry Starr (1988) The Crater (1980) NONFICTION Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20 th-Century America (1992) The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800—i8go (1985) So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1675—1677 (with James K. Folsom; 1978) Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600—1860 (1973) Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. . . . Their eyes are fixed upon . . . [their] own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. This magnihcent image of themselves does not meet the gaze of Americans at intervals only; it may be said to haunt every one of them in his least as well as his most important actions and to be always flitting before his mind. Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1835) You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? . . . Anyway, you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter .... Michael Herr Dispatches It’s time to see the frontiers as they are. Fiction, but a fiction meaning blood . . . John Berryman “The Dangerous Year” (1942) Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/gunfighternationOOslot Acknowledgments I began researching this book more than twenty years ago, and over the years have benefited from the advice and criticism of more colleagues, friends, and students than I can readily list. I want particularly to thank the Trustees of Wesleyan University, and former President Colin G. Campbell, for their consistent support of my research through the university’s sabbatical and research grant programs; and for helping to create and maintain an academic environment in which undergraduate teaching and research are mutually reinforcing. Parts of this study were completed with the aid of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks also to Jim Belson, who invited me to participate in the NEH Symposium on “The Western” at Sun Valley, 1976. I am indebted, in ways that footnotes don’t quite cover, to the ideas and suggestions of: Jeanine Basinger, Sacvan Bercov- itch. Hazel Carby, Mark Cooper, Michael Denning, Eric Greene, Joan Hedrick, David Konstan, Lary May, Richard Ohmann, Robert O’Meally, Joseph Reed, Michael Rogin, Mark Slobin, William Stowe, Alan Trachtenberg, Elizabeth Traube, Dufheld White and Christina Zwarg. I am grateful to Iris Slotkin for the understanding and support she has given me, for years of good conversation about the ideas in this book, and for introducing me to “systems” theories of psychological, familial, and social interaction. Thanks also to Joel Slotkin, for helping with the bibliography and setting up my computer. ah Ltu 4‘V /*. « r. -r^X' . 'lif jinfff i4l^':l<•*1 ’ nt.^ ,i t rn-!.' 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