The American West
Page 50
Yosemite climbers formed an elite subculture. Few climbers possessed the strength, dexterity, and skill, not to mention courage, to follow their routes and join their gang. But the influence of the Camp 4 subculture far exceeded their numbers who actually belonged to it. By the 1970s ABC’s Wide World of Sports was televising Yosemite ascents. The best climbers soon became rock gods. They appeared on magazine covers, received endorsement deals, and founded fashion lines. A surprising number of popular outdoor apparel and gear companies emerged from the climbing subculture. Although the names and exploits of Yosemite climbers never reached the upper echelons of American sport, the gear companies were a different story. North Face, REI, Kelty, and Marmot sold the subculture to millions of Americans. Urban consumers purchased mountains of coats, sleeping bags, and hiking boots, buying into the fetish that connected these items to spectacular and genuine alpine environments. The elite climbing subculture manufactured an authentic relationship with western nature; the gear and apparel companies peddled it.
No climber or company better epitomized the welding of climbing subculture and outdoor fashion more than Yvon Chouinard and Patagonia. Chouinard’s French Canadian father moved the family to southern California in 1947. While other boys surfed and built hot rods, Chouinard trained falcons and scrambled up rocks to investigate aeries. He joined the Sierra Club and fell in with the Yosemite climbers. In the 1960s he took part in several ascents, including the North American Wall and Muir Wall of El Capitan. Chouinard preached minimalism. His group climbed without fixed ropes. To do this and come back not only righteous but alive, climbers needed new technology—lighter and stronger pitons, anchors, wedges, and chocks that allowed them to fix fewer ropes and thereby hammer nature less. Chouinard advocated “clean climbing” and presented his gear as a technology for nature appreciation instead of conquest.
He began selling outdoor clothing and incorporated Patagonia in 1973. The company champions recycling, sources organic cotton, and funds environmental internships. Employees enjoy a vegan cafeteria and a flextime policy that gives them time to go climbing and surfing. The company has donated millions of dollars to groups seeking the protection and restoration of wild trout, the removal of dams, and a ban on petroleum drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska’s North Slope. Today Patagonia is as famous for its activism as for its fleeces and rain jackets. Patagonia contributes 1 percent of total sales or 10 percent of profits (whichever is bigger) to environmental groups.
With its high-priced clothing and accessory lines, the company marketed to a clientele with deep pockets and green politics. Their down vests and organic jeans sold in catalogs that featured magnificent coastlines and burbling mountain streams, suggesting that first-world consumers could enjoy and protect pristine nature while assembling a wardrobe fit for a walk-in closet. During the 2011 Christmas shopping season the company ran a marketing campaign that played off the contradictions of being Patagonia. “Don’t Buy This Jacket,” ads implored consumers. Think before you buy. A wealthy stratum was consuming more than their share of the planet’s natural resources, a lavish indulgence that contributed to environmental problems from climate change to habitat destruction. These were Patagonia’s people. Yet in the end, Patagonia sold more jackets by asking customers to “buy less.”8
Urban explorers, Chicago. Photograph by TheeErin, 2011. Creative Commons.
In truth, the new economies lean heavily on the earth. They extract energy and materials. They leave behind waste. The main difference between Microsoft, Patagonia, and U.S. Steel is packaging. Microsoft and Patagonia push the illusion that rich consumers can enjoy the digital content and the carabiner key fobs without worrying about the consequences of their privileged hoarding. Patagonia wears its hypocrisy more openly than most. Pointing out the company’s flaws is easy. Patagonia retails state-of-the-art outdoor gear and apparel to a clientele that shuffles from houses to cars to cubicles. The top of El Capitan or the North Wall might as well be the surface of Mars to their average customers. Yet these couch-surfers buy into the purist climbing ethic when they consume Patagonia’s products. Just as Chouinard and the purists at Camp 4 turned rock climbing into an ethical workout, the marketers at Patagonia turned shopping into a moral pursuit.
When a young urban professional hops off the Chicago Red Line, shoulders a Kelty backpack, and zips up a North Face fleece, when she wades through a puddle of slush in Keen boots and checks her email on a smartphone encased in a Patagonia sea lion shell, she radiates western material connections that probably go unnoticed by her and the crowd she joins on the street. Kelty (Boulder, Colorado) and North Face (San Francisco) emerged from the same postwar stew of youth rebellion, sheer rock faces, and athletic performance that yielded Patagonia. Keen (Portland, Oregon) continued the tradition of western-based outdoor apparel companies that sold equipment for sports performed in trees, mountains, and rivers to subway riders. The Yuppie might know the regional derivation of her stuff, or she might enjoy the geographic dislocation of global consumer culture. She might worry about the damage her purchasing choices have on distant habitats, or she might feel herself cut off from nature, a city-dweller with no dog in far-off environmental fights. She could swerve in manifold directions, and that is the wonder of the information age. She could be a regionalist, a locavore, a huge fan of Yosemite, Portland, or even Quincy, or she could float above the earth in global streams of information, products, and affiliations. Perhaps she mingles both, living globally part of the time, locally at other moments. In an era of stupendous choice, locating people in cities, regions, and nations has become tricky. They might reside in a place, but that’s no guarantee that they live there. Such is the world that tourism and extreme sports helped create.
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The same freedom of immersion or oblivion flourishes in the entertainment industry. Westerns were the most popular story-telling genre of twentieth-century America. The dime novel tradition was continued with the “pulps,” weekly or monthly story magazines printed on cheap paper made of wood pulp. The most successful writer of western pulp fiction was Zane Grey, a midwestern dentist who hit it big with his novel Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), in which the lightning-fast gunman hero rescues his lover from Mormon perfidy. Filled with violence, intrigue, cross-dressing, hard-riding women, and plenty of sex, the novel sold nearly two million copies. Over the next twenty years Grey published fifty-six westerns and sold at least seventeen million books. Between the world wars more than a hundred Hollywood films were based on Grey’s novels.
The popularity of the western continued into the postwar period. In the 1950s westerns made up at least 10 percent of all the fiction titles published in the United States, and paperback westerns flew off the racks at the rate of thirty-five million a year. The unrivaled master of the postwar western was Louis L’Amour, a North Dakotan who spent years honing his Teddy Rooseveltian vigor, working as a ranch hand, miner, fruit picker, longshoreman, and professional boxer before enlisting as an officer in the tank corps during the war. He turned to writing after the fighting, scoring his first major success with the short story “The Gift of Cochise,” which was the basis for the movie Hondo (1953), starring John Wayne. Before his death in 1988, L’Amour had sold two hundred million copies of more than a hundred westerns, at least thirty of which were adapted for motion pictures or television. Churning out tough-guy plots featuring lone gunmen taking down Indians and bad guys with righteous violence, L’Amour dragged frontier stereotypes into the jet age and spread them to the recesses of the globe through mass-market fiction.
George Barnes aims at the audience. Frame from The Great Train Robbery (1903). Wikimedia Commons.
Hollywood had been making westerns since The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first motion picture to tell a complete story. Based on the holdup of the Union Pacific by an outlaw gang known as the Wild Bunch, the plot built on the Wild West formula pioneered by Buffalo Bill Cody. In the film’s final sequence, one of the outlaws
points his revolver directly at the audience and fires. People were thrilled. The Great Train Robbery marked the birth of the American motion picture industry, which from its beginnings was preoccupied with western stories. Over the next sixty years at least a third of all the films made in the United States were westerns.
Westerns became a primary source for twentieth-century images of American manhood. For sheer masculinity, probably no movie star before World War II was more powerful than Gary Cooper, who appeared in at least a dozen westerns by 1940. In the role that made him a star, Cooper played the nameless hero in The Virginian (1929), which faithfully followed Owen Wister’s novel. Part of the appeal of westerns undoubtedly lies in the psychological realm. Feminist film critics argue persuasively that Hollywood pictures impose a male-oriented perspective—“the male gaze”—which encourages women as well as men to view women on the screen as the objects of male pleasure. But surely an actor like Cooper—lithe and sexually smoldering—was equally the object of an admiring “female gaze.” The strong man with a gun has obvious sexual connotations, and as the roles of women changed and broadened in the twentieth century there may have been women as well as men who looked on images of male dominance with a shiver of nostalgia. But there seems little doubt that the primary audience for westerns was male.
Gary Cooper’s breakout role in The Virginian (1929). Wikimedia Commons.
From 1945 through the mid-1960s, Hollywood produced an average of seventy-five western features each year, a quarter of all films released in the United States. Most were forgotten as soon as the house lights came up, but a few endured as cinematic classics. John Ford had become the unrivaled master of the genre with Stagecoach (1939), the most impressive and influential western of the late thirties. A dangerous stagecoach journey through Apache country during Geronimo’s uprising throws together a colorful cast of characters drawn directly from dime novels and pulp fiction: a good-badman seeking revenge (John Wayne, in the role that made him a star), a whore with a heart of gold, an alcoholic doctor, a respectable army wife, an aristocratic southerner, and a venal banker. The film included scenes shot in spectacular Monument Valley on the Navajo reservation, with its fantastic buttes towering above the desert—a site fully worthy of Bierstadt’s art. There is a wonderful stunt sequence in which renegade Apaches (played by local Navajos) chase the stagecoach through the desert until the day is saved by the last-minute arrival of the cavalry. But Ford manipulates and recombines these conventional elements into a film that amounts to considerably more than the sum of its parts. He skillfully reveals the “civilized” members of the party as snobs, hypocrites, or crooks and recruits audience sympathy for the outcasts, who become the heroes of the melodrama. The film celebrates westering while it simultaneously debunks the civilization brought to the West by the East. In the end the good-badman and the whore ride off to spend their lives together on a ranch in Mexico, “saved from the blessings of civilization,” as one of the characters puts it. Stagecoach is able to have it both ways, which is the way the western has always wanted to tell the story of America.
Rio Grande (1950), the third picture in director John Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy.” Wikimedia Commons.
Ford returned to the genre after the hiatus of the war, taking up nearly all the major themes of postwar westerns. His “Cavalry Trilogy”—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950)—detailed the life of frontier troopers, encouraging viewers to identify with the war against the Indians, whom Ford presented as little more than terrorists. Wagon Master (1950) told the story of the Overland Trail and became the basis of a long-running television series. Perhaps most influential was Ford’s lyrical My Darling Clementine (1946), in which Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) faces down a brutish family of outlaws, a black-and-white confrontation between “savagery and civilization.”
Hollywood celebrated a particular vision of frontier justice—isolated men solving problems with bullets. Shane (1953), based on the range wars of the nineteenth century, featured a gunslinger (Alan Ladd) who reluctantly fights the ruthless cattlemen on behalf of wholesome homesteaders. Similarly in High Noon (1952), the sheriff (Gary Cooper) rejects the pleas of his Quaker bride (a reprise of a very similar scene in The Virginian) to stand alone against the outlaws. A remarkable series of films combining the talents of director Budd Boetticher, scriptwriter Burt Kennedy, and veteran actor Randolph Scott—Seven Men from Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960)—examined self-reliance and individual courage. As Scott asserts in a famous line: “There are some things a man can’t ride around.” Another series, directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart—Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), and The Man from Laramie (1955)—focused on characters driven by pathological rage but redeemed by their decision to act for the common good.9
Westerns also dominated television programming during the 1950s and 1960s. The first cowboy star to make the switch to the small screen was William Boyd, who played the good guy Hopalong Cassidy in a long series of B-westerns inaugurated in 1935. In 1948, with the series running out of steam, Boyd quietly acquired broadcast rights and leased the films to local television stations around the country. They proved so popular that NBC signed Boyd to star in a weekly program. Hopalong Cassidy was an immediate hit, with radio, comic book, and merchandising spinoffs adding to Boyd’s estimated two-hundred-million-dollar take. In the wake of this success, westerns became the most popular children’s television programs. Weekly series featured singing cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion Tonto, and the adventures of iconic frontier characters like Wild Bill Hickok, Kit Carson, and Annie Oakley. In 1954 Disney produced a Davy Crockett series that became a national sensation. Americans spent more than a hundred million dollars on coonskin caps and other Crockettabilia, including four million copies of the recording “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.”
The next year westerns appeared on the prime-time network lineup for the first time. Gunsmoke, with fictional Dodge City marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness), was the number one show in the country by 1957. Suddenly the rush for western adult programming was on. In 1958 twenty-eight prime-time westerns provided more than seventeen hours of gunplay and Indian fighting each week, and according to the Neilson ratings, westerns captured eight of the nation’s top ten program slots. The heroes were all men with access to firearms, tough sheriffs and bounty hunters, but unlike Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers, they frequented saloons, drank whiskey, and cavorted with prostitutes. The regular violence brought criticism. “There must be dead bodies,” the costar of the TV series Wagon Train angrily responded. “In the period of history we’re dealing with, it’s either kill or be killed. Anybody who studies history knows that.” Television writers delivered retrograde cartoons of western violence and justice. Guns settled disputes and legal questions. Lawyers and judges were rarely seen. The westerns trashed civil liberties.10
James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke (1955–75), the longest-running prime-time dramatic series in U. S. television history. Wikimedia Commons.
It was hard to miss the politics of most westerns. Most clearly, they served as a vehicle for promoting America’s role in the Cold War. In Rio Grande (1950) the cavalry pursuit of Apaches provided an oblique commentary on the Korean War, and John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) offered a fantasy version of Third World counterinsurgency. Metaphors of western violence—showdowns, hired guns, last stands—permeated the language of postwar politics. “Would a Wyatt Earp stop at the 38th Parallel in Korea when the rustlers were escaping with his herd?” a conservative political commentator whined in 1958. “Would Marshal Dillon refuse to allow deputies to use shotguns for their own defense because of the terrible nature of the weapon itself? Ha!” The analogy continued into the Vietnam era. President Johnson told a reporter that “he had gone into Vietnam because, as at the Alamo, som
ebody had to get behind the log with those threatened people.” And as a way of explaining the slow progress of political reform in American-controlled territory, ambassador to Vietnam Maxwell Taylor told a congressional committee that “it is very hard to plant corn outside a stockade when the Indians are still around.” American troops carried these metaphors into battle. The primary object of the fighting, one veteran later recalled, was “the Indian idea: the only good gook is a dead gook.” Taking the ears of enemy dead was “like scalps, you know, like from the Indians. Some people were on an Indian trip over there.” Reporter Michael Herr wrote of being invited to join an army company on a search and destroy mission. “‘Come on,’ hailed the captain, ‘we’ll take you out to play cowboys and Indians.’”11
Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), released in the United States in 1967. Wikimedia Commons.
The connection between westerns and political ideology is perhaps best evidenced by the precipitous demise of the genre amid the general cultural crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. Consider the case of filmmaker John Ford. Not since William Cody had an artist better assembled the components of frontier myth as popular entertainment. But in the final westerns of his career, Ford’s vision of frontier history soured. The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne plays an incorrigible racist, is an uncompromising study of the devastating effects of Indian hating, and Sargent Rutledge (1960) is a pathbreaking depiction of black Buffalo Soldiers in the frontier army. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Ford called attention to the good things lost in the civilizing process, and in his final western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), he finally presented a case for the Indians, exposing the American side of the frontier as murderous and corrupt.