< PREVIOUS ] [ 1998 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Say what you will about the survival of the Old
West,
it remains alive and well as a mythology, even
among people who should know better.
At hand is the Dec. 18 edition of _The Wall Street
Journal_. It contains a column by one Irving Kristol,
publisher of _The National Interest_, co-editor of _The
Public Interest_, fellow of the American Enterprise
Institute, and father of Bill Kristol, who once served as
Dan Quayle's Brain.
The elder Kristol observes that the class struggle
seems not to exist in an affluent capitalist society,
asks why, and proceeds to answer his rhetorical
question:
To some extent, it results from having a populace
that has a set of attitudes and an intuitive understanding
-- derived from its cultural history ... The U.S. is
pre-eminently such a nation. It was individual risk takers
-- not the state -- that settled the original colonies and
then the West.
There it is again, the Old West mythology that
individual risk takers,
rather than that pernicious
national government, who settled the West.
For starters, Kristol's mythic history assumes that the
West was not settled before those risk takers set forth
from Ohio after the Civil War. Since he uses the word
settled,
we'll ignore the nomads who peopled much of
the West.
But there remains Santa Fe, founded in 1609 and the
oldest seat of government in the United States. That's
about as settled
as a place can get in this country.
Or what of the nearby pueblos along the upper Rio Grande,
some dating to 1300 or perhaps before? If seven centuries
of continued human habitation of a place isn't enough to
make a place settled for Kristol, what is?
Well, perhaps they were the wrong kind of humans for
Kristol. So let's look at other immigrants, the ones with
a cultural history
acceptable to Kristol.
Any honest history of this region reveals that the federal government served the major role in the conquest of the West.
Consider the saga of Otto Mears, a pioneer entrepreneur enshrined in the Colorado state capitol.
Mears is a man I find admirable. Orphaned in Russia, he was sent to live with an uncle in this country. No one met the 10-year-old boy at the dock, and he had to make his way in the lurid Barbary Coast of San Francisco.
Despite this childhood trauma which would have made a wimpy modern kid into a dysfunctional serial killer, Mears went on to live a productive life as a merchant and transportation tycoon.
But Mears never failed to go after every possible dime of government money: federal agreements to buy the flour from his gristmills and the timber from his sawmills for Army posts, federal deals to buy Mears beef for Indian reservations, federal appointments to negotiate treaties with the Utes, federal contracts to haul mail and freight ...
Nor was Mears an isolated instance. There were huge government subsidies -- land grants -- to build railroads that served farmers and miners.
The farmer either bought his land from the railroad, or homesteaded it -- another government subsidy, and of course the government surveyor had to come through first.
The miner staked his claim on government land, then agitated for government-built roads and government-operated post offices. If the Utes objected, he wanted the government cavalry to remove or exterminate them. Then he wanted to sell his silver at a government-subsidized price.
The same ranchers who whine today about federal schemes to re-introduce wolves and grizzlies perhaps had great-grandfathers who beseeched the government to send out a hunter from the Predator Control Service to eliminate the critters -- yet another government subsidy.
Grandad might have been agitating for a federal Bureau of Reclamation water project so as to make the hay crop a little more predictable, and the modern rancher's mother doubtless welcomed the federal Rural Electrification Administration, especially on wash day.
As historian Richard Wright observes in _It's Your
Misfortune and None of Your Own_, The American West...is
a creation not so much of individual or local efforts, but
of federal efforts. More than any other region, the West
has been historically a dependency of the federal
government.
That's the real story. The West might have teemed with
entrepreneurs, but they were hustling for federal
protection, services, grants, contracts, and subsidies --
assistance in every known form. The pioneers were not out
here living off the land
as rugged
individualists.
But maybe we should let Kristol off the hook. After
all, he doesn't mention real history, but cultural
history
-- that is, stuff fabricated by Hollywood in
need of guts-and-glory audiences and by politicians who
want to flatter their audiences.
In those mythic regions the Old West lives on -- indeed, that's the only place where it ever existed at all.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1998 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >