The "western" myth of America

[SoCalDem]

We all know our pResident thinks he's a cowboy.. His henchmen think THEY are cowboys, and the rest of the world complains about our "cowboy ways"..

The movies of the 30's, 40's & 50's created the myth. Think about who those people were.. Most of these people who made the movies, wrote the books & wrote the screenplays were probably born at or near the turn of the century. Most of them probably were raised in cities in the east. Many were immigrants or first generation Americans. They probably had grandfathers who were illiterate, and many of whom who made treks west to "find their fortunes"... If they returned, it was most likely they did NOT, so of course they would have embellished their "stories"..

No Grandpa wants to tell his grandson how he tried to find gold, but ended up getting robbed, nearly starved to death and barely made it back alive.

Lawlessness had to have been rampant, and no doubt many of the things we saw in the movies probably did happen..to some degree...but as a Granddad sitting on the porch telling his grandkids about "the west", it's not hard to see how so many people in that generation had the ideas about the west that they did.

This particular group of European men had endured much hardship in Europe and surely wanted to believe only the best of their new homes, so that may have had something to do with it too.

Westerns were also cheaper to shoot, since there were still many places to shoot, no laws to speak of and the "stories" would have been familiar to a whole generation.

The "rugged individualist" myth comes from the fact that land was often given away. Who among us NOW would not move to a different place if free land was a part of the deal?

Life back then was not good at all for most people, so a new start would have been very appealing.

The westerns played upon that theme. Everyone has a sense of adventure, so it's easy to see how the myth continues..well past its "need".

Times are different now, people are supposedly more educated, but they are not taught the real stories of the west..On rare occasions, a counter-culture western comes along, but it rarely changes any minds..

Just like many family stories, the actual truth of the matter is often quite sordid, when we find out as adults.

We are being kept infantile and the rest of the world knows the truth about our country. We still pretend that the myths are truth..We seem to be the only ones who try our best to NOT know.

[unblock]

1. spot on as usual, socal.

america should have clued in when we had an actor as president, but the lure of myths is strong.

even ceo's -- who cannot make a dime without a huge support team, including investors, employees, customers, suppliers, and cooperation from government -- fancy themselves and their corporation as "rugged individualists" who earned single-handedly every penny they could steer to their own bank account.

the reality of the west is also that families helped each other. all the time. just thing about the way houses were built. those were community endeavors. what? a rugged individualist asking the entire town to help build him a house instead of doing it himself? yup, that's the way it happened.


in a different context, someone once said "it takes a village"....

[xchrom]

2. recommend.

[Clark2008]

3. When you consider this country was technically founded

by what the English considered "criminals" back in the 1600-1700s, then this makes sense.

Sure, the founders' ideals became to be known as correct and just - equal rights, democratic representation, etc. - but, at the time, they were lawless. They were "rugged individualists, etc.

But, as an aside and quite contradictory, they also were Puritanical when it came to sex and women and most were racist, as well. We really haven't moved much beyond what our founding fathers were.

[SoCalDem]

5. and of course men defined women then too.. They were "allowed"

to have both kinds of women. Women could be a spinster school marm, a wife or a harlot..and men defined which she would be.

the lawlessness is what attracted many men to "go west", but you can only be lawless just so long until someone tougher shoots you..

I think the 'real" west was more like "Deadwood", than the sanitized western movies we "learned from".. smelly, muddy, dangerous and not nearly the idealized era we like to think it was..

[HereSince1628]

4. Yes, an unfortunate atavistic worship of an idealized past

It's amazing how radical movements with little actual past are capable of capturing heroic icons to satisfy a missing sense of historical significance.

[melody]

6. The "old west" was as complex a period of time as this one

My great-grandfather was an Arkansas Ranger and also a sheriff in Fort Smith. He knocked elbows with legendary
people. He also was a quiet, contemplative family man who was profoundly against the Klan. Whenever we try
to stereotype time periods o groups of people as "good" or "bad", it's a mistake.

[EFerrari]

7. The cult of the individual in America goes back to the Puritans and was

a form of social control for communities with little law enforcement capability. It was a way of making the individual directly accountable to the congregation.

And, too, the fiction of a vast empty continent to be conquered elides the genocide that actually happened. Wild Bill replaces Spider Woman.

Even before talkies, stories about the "wild West" circulated in pamphlets and papers, then in magazines and novels. Remember when people read stuff? :)

/oops

[JHB]

8. You're a bit ahistorical on this...

...not that I disagree, but it goes back further than you think.

The myth of "The West" was drawn up almost simultaneously with the fact, once it became the favorite subject of the "reality/trash TV" of its day, the dime novels. It was build up further in the later part of the century by traveling "Wild West" shows (of which William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's was the famous). By then the setting was so stock that one of the first real movies ("The Great Train Robbery (1903)) was already a stereotype, but the new medium gave it a new dazzle and shine.

And a lot of those "rugged men it the west" legends go back even further, to when "the west" was the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, and the stories about Daniel Boone and his contemporaries.

It's a mythology that's being played upon, but it does run deep. And it's also one with plenty of stories about cooperation and community, if you look for them.

[SoCalDem]

9. That's right.. the people doing the first round of idealization were

the ones who had participated in it, but the ones who made the more stylized movies that most people living today grew up on, were the sons/grandsons of those people, and the stories that egged them on might have been "embellished" a lot..

When you read historical texts of the era, it was a real slog just to survive most of the time, with Mother Nature being the biggest villain of them all..

I guess adventure tales are always embellished.. Perhaps the Vikings came back from their adventures and told tall-ish tales to their kids too :)

[JHB]

11. You meant the great Sagas aren't all fact?

I'm shocked! SHOCKED! :evilgrin:

:toast:

[SoCalDem]

12. We all know how Erik loved to talk once he got liquoured up

:)

[papau]

10. One relative kept a "six shooter" in the Kitchen bench where we sat on visits, and

told stories about bad guys and shooting snakes.

Only later did I find out that cowboy deaths via falling off a spooked horse with a stuck to the boot stirrup and being dragged to death was the main reason for the gun - you shoot the horse if needed.