Appunti storia della cultura nordamericana

Introduction

What is a Western?

It is a genre that has a very long history in the United States: we can see it reproduced in movies, books, comics, cartoons and also videogames. It has to do with geography, identity and history. This genre has existed in America for so many years that it has travelled the world and has entered our culture in Europe: everybody now has an idea of what a Western is, even though they can’t name a particular piece of Western art. The Western was so important that some examples can be found also outside the United States.

For example, in Italy during the 1960’s, there was the work of directors like Sergio Leone, who directed films such as "For a Few Dollars More" and "Il Buono, il Brutto e il Cattivo". His works had a great impact on the United States too.

The myth - Richard Slotkin

Slotkin describes the myth as something that is not reality: it is certainly connected to it but could be defined as a summary of the complexity of reality. Because of its circulation within culture, it has become a sort of historical memory of the whole nation; however, it has nothing to do with reality, but with ideology. The ideological summary of history is not history.

Karl Marx on ideology

According to Karl Marx, ideology is “the system of ideas that explains, or makes sense of, a society: it is the mechanism by which unequal social relations are reproduced”. Since society is unequal, there are people who have more power and people who are subordinate. Those who have the political and economic power in a society also have the power of making some ideas circulate: that’s the moment when they can become hegemonic, accepted as values. According to Marx, ideology has a social meaning: it has to do with the powerful people imposing their ideas on the weak. This misrepresentation of meaning and social relations is referred to by Marx as ‘false consciousness’, or a false view of one’s ‘true’ social condition, something that has a coercive power over the subordinate classes.

Althusser on ideology

According to Althusser, ideology is something that provides people with a sense of identity and security through structures such as languages, social codes and conventions. It is something we are all “born into”: it’s a set of ideas we take for granted without even realizing it.

Slotkin on ideology

According to Slotkin, ideology is what justifies the political power of someone else. It is “an abstraction of the system of beliefs, values and institutional relationships that characterize a particular culture or society”.

Myth: Story vs. History

By describing a myth, Slotkin makes an important distinction between story and history:

• Story: It’s a narration, something you create to achieve a certain result, a perspective on history.
• History: The reality of facts, usually complex.

The repetition of a story happens so many times that it becomes a tradition (ideology), losing its historical basis. It can be invoked without the necessity of explaining it and becomes common sense: we don’t even question it, we take it for granted.

For example, from history (the English colonization of the West territory of America) a story has been created: that of cowboys, men fighting Indians. In history, cowboys are nothing important: they are just men who carry after cows. But the repetition of stories about them made them heroes. The figure of the cowboy becomes important for the American culture for the narration of its independence, the idea of freedom, expansion, and white masculinity. It becomes a means of entertainment.

Frontier

In his text, Slotkin uses a key word: Frontier. It is an important part of the American history, and it’s different from border. It can be considered both as a historical and as a metaphorical event that reminds the course of American history and the development of a peculiarly American character. The frontier is that in-between space, from civilization and the wilderness and the Indian territory specifically. We could imagine the frontier as a line that moves with the white settlement on the North American: in certain occasions, it was a spontaneous white settlement, in other cases it was sponsored by the US government (sale of lands at a very low price), in other cases it was a land rush: a sort of run to claim land (Oklahoma). People were interested in going to these new lands, which were not wild but inhabited by Native Americans.

The Frontier was that place where people could prove their value, where citizens of democracy could develop and create a new state to be progressively included within the nation. A significant difference is made between:

• Border: What separates different sovereign States.
• Frontier: What separates civilization from wilderness.

Video: American history from 1800 to 1848

Growth (and expansion) is one of the key concepts of this period: this is the era of nationalism when the United States began to grow both philosophically and physically. The US was the first nation to develop a new model of Democracy and during these years it had to rapidly change its institutions to match this ideology.

Americans got this idea that God gave them the right to inhabit the country from coast to coast and spread democracy: they called it Manifest Destiny. Europeans could claim the right of possession of that territory because they were civilized: people living there were not considered part of the civilized world. In general, during the XIX century, there is a vision of the West as a land of opportunities, with an absence of limits.

With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 by Thomas Jefferson (who bought it from the French), the USA almost doubled their size: a great part of the territory on the West of Mississippi river was involved in this negotiation. In 1819 Spain agreed to cede Florida to the US and in 1923, with the Monroe Doctrine, the president declared that the American continents are henceforth off-limits for further colonization by European powers.

With the Mexican-American war of the 1840’s, the country continued its geographic growth in the southwest and California. The geographical expansion of the United States went together with their growth as a nation.

Developing an American identity

The second key element is that of the expansion had much to do with this development. Its rapid expansion forced America to take a real introspective look at itself: problem of slavery (Abolition Movement), religious problems (different religious views from area to area), fighting against corruption.

Andrew Jackson was the president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. He started to change the attitude of respect towards Native Americans that was used until that moment: usually lands were conquered peacefully. He didn’t want to recognize Native Americans’ sovereignty on American lands: the general discussion was that Indians could not continue to exist. There were two different opinions about what to do with Native Americans:

• They were assimilated.
• They were removed.

At a certain point in the history of the US, the public debate more or less agreed that Native Americans could not be assimilated: they were considered to be too racially different to become part of the American nation. That’s why their removal became the only possible solution. In the 1830’s there was this important Indian removal, known as the Trail of Tears, for the number of Indians who died during it; in the 1830 the five big civilized Indian nations were removed: the Cherokee, mainly set in Georgia, the Creek, the Seminole from Florida, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw. They were all moved to what today is Oklahoma. It can be considered as a real ethnic cleansing, for ideological reasons (they were too different and could be civilized) and at the same time for economical and practical reasons (they occupied an entire land that could be useful, for example, for planting cotton).

John O’Sullivan: Manifest Destiny

John O’Sullivan was a newspaper editor. He argued that the United States had this divine mandate to expand through North America; he talks about providence. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny was an ideological take on historical processes: he was morally interpreting something that had to do with politics. He never talks about practical and political matters.

He was the person who used the term Manifest Destiny for the first time in 1845 to promote the annexation of Texas and Oregon to the United States. It was used, basically, to explain the ideology behind the geographical expansion of the US: according to this ideology, it was right for the nation to expand because of its exceptional ideals of liberty, democracy. The moral superiority of the United States in comparison to the native populations should have been clear to everyone (it was universal): that’s why O’Sullivan considered that Indians should have been happy to become part of the US because of its values of equality, independence, freedom.

In his article, O’Sullivan considers the United States’ national birth as the beginning of a new history: he stresses the fact that the American nation is completely separated from the past and from Europe, from its crimes, antiquities, injustices, oppressions. He assumes that the US has a moral superiority and is “destined to be the great nation of futurity”: strong connection with future, but little connection to the past.

What O’Sullivan is providing is of course a partial vision of history, that he uses to create a moral excuse for the conquer of the West. It has to do with a form of individualism, that is typically American: this idea that nothing and nobody can prevent a person from achieving their results.

This idea of Manifest Destiny has lasted so many years that it has become a sort of common knowledge: it was a visuality of how the United States saw themselves.

John Gast: America Progress 1872 Emmanuel: Westward – The course of the Empire takes its way 1861

Frederick Jackson Turner: the significance of the frontier in American history

Turner was an historian, and his essay can be considered to contain the most well-known thesis ever, at least as regards the United States. It is a thesis which has had a profound effect on the American culture and society, even though it is just a theory and is not a matter of scientific proof. Its impact was important for the American perception of itself as a nation. Turner’s thesis was presented in July 1893 and was in line with the general atmosphere (O’Sullivan and his Manifest Destiny): it praised the American citizen and his ability to build an empire out of wilderness. He points out that no other country in the world has had a history similar to the American one. He states that the focus has been put on Europeans for too long, and that the Americans are superior because of their connection with the Indians. He contributed to the creation of the importance of the frontier in American history.

According to Turner, the frontier is the place for the creation of the American man: that’s because it offers a contact with nature and with Native Americans. He describes the frontier as a space where the American state has not yet established: there is an in-between form of society where people settled and progressively a state was formed. Ideally, the frontier is a line which marks the advancement of the civilization in the American territory. Of course, that of Turner is a vision of American history, population and geography that implies an idea of free land that was not historically true: the land where white people settled, in fact, was not free but was already inhabited by Indians. It was a conquest more than a settlement.

What Turner is saying is that the frontier was over at the end of the XIX century: demographically speaking, every square mile of the American land was inhabited by at least two white people. The white settlement covered more or less all the American continent and the frontier reached the Pacific Ocean. Because the frontier was announced closed, it started to emerge in the American culture as a powerful metaphor for progress and as an imaginative space where to go in order to find what was considered to be a great and simple life.

What Turner has said had an enormous success: in the following decades his vision became the established vision of how to interpret American history and culture. We can say it became a “myth” which interpreted the past. The diffusion of this idea continued over the XX century, at least until the 1960’s when the revisionist attempt started. That happened despite the fact that other historians proved that Turner’s thesis was completely imprecise.

The reason why Turner’s thesis became so popular is that other things were happening in American society at that time: an example is the end of the war between Native Americans and the US army, which managed to defeat Indians proving that white Americans had stopped the Indian resistance (symbolic event: Sitting Bull dies). It was not just the end of the frontier era, but also the beginning of a new imperialistic and transnational moment for the United States. At the end of the XIX century, the US became a more industrial nation and started to become an incredibly powerful nation in comparison to every other nation of the world. With the war against Spanish in 1898, the United States became a prominent transnational actor. Cities had a growing importance: United States have been an agrarian country before Civil War, but then a new important migration happened, from Italy, Greece, Poland, Asia, Eastern Europe.

The new reality that people had to face in the new century was more industrial, more urban, more defined by machines of different kinds and, of course, more complicated. In a moment of such great modification, Western as a genre provided a vision of who Americans were. The ideology of Turner became epic, just like the figures which inhabited the West (cowboys): it became part of the common vision of the United States and started to affect its entertainment (books, paintings, films). It provided a simplistic vision of the past which was necessary in order to face the novelty of the present and American culture.

Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt and Frederic Remington, together with Turner, are considered to be two of the fathers of this Western ideology. Roosevelt was young and a not very strong looking man when he was sent to the West in order to gain some masculinity: he told his story in the book the winning of the West, which was published in 1889. During this experience he passed from being a young and weak boy to being the 25th President of the United States, in 1901. Frederic Remington was a painter that contributed with the creation of Western ideology: he provided a lot of images that became part of the western visual capital. All these people, each in their specific way, focused on the Western experience especially connected to the searching of key elements, such as a cowboy riding a horse, nature.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show

The Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show lasted for a very long time. It was active between 1870 and 1920, lasting 50 years. It means it was extremely popular. It was a business enterprise that sold an image of the west and people bought tickets to go and see the idea of what the western world was like.

Buffalo Bill, before becoming the entertainer, was an Indian fighter, a buffalo hunter, and then he started this business which had great popularity. He was so popular that he performed outside of the US too, like in Rome and London. People were really curious about what the western looked like, so they went to watch it at the Buffalo Bill’s show. In reality, it had nothing to do with what it actually looked like. It was some sort of circus. They toured the US and had different shows (mock cowboys, cows, people riding wild horses and stuff, demonstrations, ropes, shooting contests etc).

The intention of the show was to provide knowledge but also commemorating this romantic vision of the frontier. And the Wild West Show, as all the painters and historians, was a very important figure for the ideology of the frontier mind because there were no other ways of knowing about it. This idea was invoked many times, with books, films.

Dime Novels

Dime novels were extremely important for the development of Western as a genre. They were novels that cost a dime: a dime is a coin whose value is 10 cents. They started to be produced in the second half of the XIX century. It was a very popular form of literature and their writers were not great writers, but it had a very important impact at that time, also because little other forms of entertainment existed. It was easy for dime novels to circulate because they were cheap and people could easily afford them; even though people lived in a small city without libraries or bookshops, they could order a dime novel and have it delivered to their house thanks to the postal system (books were created in very small formats). It was a serial production, where the repetition of certain formulas took to shared ideas about the Western era: a major brave male hero, riding a horse, death of someone. There is a complete disconnection between the reality and the work of imagination.

Initially, Western had to do with literature, but then the cinema seized on the popularity of the genre. Its influence and importance were very widespread in American culture. The first American Western movie was realized in 1903 and was called the great train robbery: it had to do with action and with the clear contraposition between the good and the bad.