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Cinema Journal, 39, Number 3, Spring 2000, pp. 66-91 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/cj.2000.0007
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Cowboys and Free Markets: Post–World War II
Westerns and U.S. Hegemony
by Stanley Corkin
This essay looks at the historical phenomenon of the western as a focal genre in
postwar America. Through discussion of Howard Hawks’s Red River and John
Ford’s My Darling Clementine, it shows how the western was well suited to convey important ideological rationales for postwar U.S. foreign policy, including the
inevitability of American expansion and the strategies for hegemony that guided
the Truman administration’s foreign policy.
Recently, in a class that focused on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century
American writings, I included Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) as required
reading. I had moved strategically toward this romance by assigning various works
that addressed the concept of “race” as it was constructed during this period. We
had talked about the term’s false biological assumptions, its nefarious social results, and its historical significance. When we arrived at Wister’s work, I assumed
we were, as a group, ready to slice through the author’s genetic explanation of
social fitness, which builds on turn-of-the-century ideologies of race, and to explore the way in which the mythology of the frontier has been employed to maintain the social and economic inequities that are so central to U.S. life.
In this popular western novel, Wister dramatizes the means by which individuals become socially and economically dominant, revealing that such status is
the result of biological fitness. This notion of aptitude is infused with notions of
American exceptionalism, Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, and the inevitable subordination of women to men, and although I thought that the first two categories
might be difficult for some students to critique, I assumed that most would at least
recognize the novel’s assertions of male dominance.
But the group did not readily recognize Wister’s misogyny. Instead, my students were captivated by Wister’s use of the frontier as a proving ground for masculine fitness. They found in Wister’s romance a plausible and emotionally engaging
explanation of what makes America great and what makes it America. It was at the
end of the course that I felt I glimpsed the extent to which frontier mythology
defines national identity. Wister elaborates the situation of the mythic frontier as a
place that characterizes the American experience and distinguishes between the
natural order of the West and the human-made order of eastern cities: easterners
should go west to find out if their place in the social hierarchy is the result of
Stanley Corkin is an associate professor and director of Graduate Studies at the University of
Cincinnati. He is the author of Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Cinema,
Literature, and Culture and co-editor of a forthcoming edition of Stephen Crane’s writings.
This essay is part of a book on postwar westerns.
© 2000 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819
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artifice or genetic inheritance. Wister and his friends—Theodore Roosevelt,
Endicott Peabody, and various other heirs to fortunes and status—engaged in this
social experiment during the last part of the nineteenth century. These scions of
the rich and prominent typically found that their experience confirmed their
Spencerian predispositions. For Wister and others, not only did the frontier provide a place to distinguish one American from another, it also showed why the
most “fit” Americans should dominate the lesser races of the globe.
Westerns as a genre, and The Virginian in particular, dramatically portray the
moment just before the incorporation of the “frontier” into the material, administrative, and, ultimately, ideological systems of the United States. This act of inclusion, through its specific terms and by its very occurrence, is supposed to
reinvigorate the nation.1 Because of the place of the idea of the frontier in national
lore, the western, in its specific contours, often appeals to its contemporary viewers in allegorical terms, frequently justifying the culturally dominant activities of a
given moment by directly or indirectly locating them as part of a quintessential
American legacy.
Perhaps Wister’s views were so resonant to my students because he offered
them a way to connect their own economic and social aspirations with the ideology
of the frontier myth. This myth defines “the West” as a condition that removes the
artifices of civilization from social life. Within the resulting state of nature, individuals show their essential qualities of character. Those who succeed do so because they are made of better stuff than others. Those who fail do so as a result of
their weakness. Such a view relies on a kind of biological determinism, as well as
on a simplified concept of nature and civilization.
While granting that my students were drawn to this world view, I do not
mean to implicate them in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century mythologies
of biological determinism, only to suggest how a belief in a kind of natural selection offers an attractive explanation for the social disparities that define latetwentieth-century life in the United States. Wister’s version of this story, as an
early-twentieth-century formulation, offers terms that speak to the age of mature capitalism—a world of corporate oligarchies and international trade. His
America is one where laissez-faire economics provides for the justice of the free
market, the frontiers of capitalist enterprise. My students in this class—representing a range of majors in a large, public, urban university—perhaps saw in
Wister’s novel a vision of the world that both enabled and justified their own
anticipated economic success. One asked, “What could be wrong with a system
where the able get what they deserve?”
My students did not learn Wister’s view of the world directly from The Virginian. In reading this novel, they built on and refined a view of the United States, the
frontier, and the individual that they had encountered many times in their lives.
This teaching episode manifested the hold that frontier mythology has on today’s
young Americans, and I wondered about its basis and means of conveyance. My
visceral responses and the hypotheses I mustered led me to reconsider a formative
moment in the current period of United States history—the end of World War II
and the beginning of the Cold War. Not coincidentally, this was also the period
Cinema Journal 39, No. 3, Spring 2000
67
when the western became a central genre of popular entertainment—perhaps the
most important one.
This essay focuses on two films—My Darling Clementine (1946) and Red River
(1948)—that recount the triumph of quintessentially “American” heroes over various agents of chaos. Arguably, this tale is at the heart of a number of post–World
War II westerns, from Fort Apache (1948) and Winchester 73 (1950) to Shane (1953)
and 3:10 to Yuma (1957), to name a few and define a chronology.2 Although My
Darling Clementine and Red River are certainly notable in their coherence, nuance,
and overall attention to craft, they are at the same time thematically typical of post–
World War II westerns. Because of the efforts of Wyatt Earp and Thomas Dunson
(two biologically fit, American-looking men), what subsequently became the southwestern part of the United States is transformed in these two films into a place
where the terms of nation—ideological, economic, and political—could become
dominant. The two westerns are set in the same period as Wister’s novel, the late
nineteenth century, and in many ways they depict a world with corresponding values and hierarchies.
The Western Genre and the World System. My Darling Clementine (1946)
tells of the heroic Earp brothers who, with the help of the essentially good but
badly disillusioned Doc Holliday, vanquish the Clantons and make Tombstone safe
for church and children. Wyatt and the others create conditions in which the school,
run by the film’s heroine, Clementine Carter, can thrive. Red River (1948) tells the
story of Tom Dunson’s arrival in South Texas and the building of his cattle empire,
which he fashions with the help of the orphaned Matthew Garth, to whom Dunson
becomes a surrogate father. The film spends most of its running time recounting
an epic cattle drive to the railhead at Abilene, which will bring Dunson’s herd to
markets in the eastern United States and beyond.
These two films generally emphasize the need for settlement and nationalism.
As my brief discussion of The Virginian suggests, this broad area of concern is not
solely the purview of these two westerns or of any westerns of the forties and
fifties. It is a theme of westerns of all eras of American film history, since the genre
lends itself not only to a focus on territorial expansion but on the depiction of more
subtle means of conquest.
As a rule, the western film is a period piece set in the later days of the nineteenth century, the period that Frederick Jackson Turner defined as the end of the
conceptual and geographic frontier.3 Thus, the western has the mythic power to
define the past not simply as a body of material and ideological events that are
recognizable and subject to analysis but as a triumphal moment when a compendium of quintessentially American traditions took hold. John Lenihan notes the
epochal qualities of the genre: “Because Westerns suggested the finality as well as
the process of frontier expansion during the late nineteenth century, they invariably contained an element of poignancy that is usually implicit but occasionally
expressed. In its classic form the Western depicted the heroic interlude that ushered in the good society.”4
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Figure 1. In Red River (1948, Howard Hawks), Tom Dunson (John Wayne)
becomes a surrogate father to the orphan Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift).
Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In focusing on this result of the conflict they depict, westerns reproduce
Turner’s assertion of the terms of American exceptionalism. The western commonly marks the transitional moment when social upheavals result in the coming
of a reelaborated Anglo-Saxon civilization, when the social structures and values
usually associated with American nationalism are reborn and reinvigorated in a
western locale.
As a genre of dime novels, the western became a popular form at the beginning
of the Civil War and remained a preeminent commercial form until the turn of the
century, when the novels were displaced by western movies.5 This rise of the genre
in print and then in film was a product of the historical moment when the rapidly
industrializing national economy was disrupting, both geographically and ideologically, the concept of the frontier as an extant locale. Indeed, those inexpensive publications were produced and distributed through the very technology that so impinged
on the West—both ideologically and physically. In this light, we may see the epochmarking essay by Frederick Jackson Turner—delivered at the Columbia Exposition
in 1893—as an elegy, even as it had the complementary powers to project the features of the society it memorialized well into the future. Also at that exposition in
Cinema Journal 39, No. 3, Spring 2000
69
1893, the Edison Company displayed the technological marvel of the kinetoscope,
the immediate forebear of the large-screen motion picture projector, which was put
on view for the first time in 1896.
Not coincidentally, the “frontier” as a place and as an ideological site was the
subject of many of the first motion pictures produced and distributed in the U.S.,
including depictions of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Soon afterward, in 1903,
The Great Train Robbery, a western based on a stage play, became one of American cinema’s first commercial hits. As Bill Brown notes, “The early history of
motion pictures is inseparable from the Western genre.”6 Similarly, The Virginian’s
popularity as a novel and its ongoing powers to engage its readers in its ideological assertions are matters deeply connected to the history of cinema in the United
States. Owen Wister’s The Virginian was published in 1902 and is very much
within the view of the frontier that marks this period, as it combines the celebratory
and the nostalgic.
John Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Howard Hawks’s Red River were
prestige productions that employed name directors, important stars, and highcost on-location shoots. Indeed, these films reveal the film industry’s investment
in this genre as a popular form.7 Although Michael Coyne has noted in his thorough summary of both films’ critical receptions that there was some equivocation
about My Darling Clementine, both movies attained the status of “classic” almost
immediately. This status enhanced their ideological power and assured their ongoing availability to film classes and film buffs—in video or on film or in revival
houses and colleges. Reviewers commented on their epic dimensions and “artful”
formal qualities, while subsequent writings on American cinema further enhanced
their mystique. Red River, for example, has long been considered a masterpiece of
American cinema and has received extensive and considered treatment: notably
by Pauline Kael, André Bazin, Robin Wood, and Peter Bogdanovich. It was Hawks’s
first western (he had directed some twenty-nine features) and his admitted favorite. Similarly, Bosley Crowther hailed My Darling Clementine as “very close to
fine art,” and it has since received its due from film canonizers ranging from Lindsay Anderson to Bogdanovich and Andrew Sarris.8 These two films celebrate a
past epoch while signaling the beginning of the western’s rise to preeminence as a
genre in the years immediately following World War II. The genre had experienced a brief revival after the success of Stagecoach (1939) and up to 1942, after
having ebbed since the beginnings of talking films. It became a central genre for
U.S. movies in the late forties, fifties, and early sixties.9
Post–World War II westerns built on antecedents within the genre and provided a conceptual bridge between frontier mythology and Cold War imperatives.
To read against their ideological thrust, I will employ Immanuel Wallerstein’s world
systems theory as a method for interrogating their view of nationhood and history.
Wallerstein provides us with a means of analyzing the way in which these films
address the economic imperatives of post–World War II expansion, helping to articulate the structural connections between late-nineteenth- and mid-twentiethcentury U.S. imperialism. That is, he provides a vital link between the era the films
depict and the era in which they were produced and exhibited. According to
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Wallerstein, “What distinguishes the social system we are calling historical capitalism is that capital came to be used (invested) . . . with the primary objective or intent
of self-expansion.”10 Wallerstein shows how the processes of accumulation and reinvestment as elements of world trade have defined the relationships among nationstates within the context of world capitalism. Such a perspective allows us to regard
the West as other than inherently American and the system of international relations that reigned in the late forties, fifties, and sixties as other than systemically
inevitable. His views aid us in resisting the romance of American expansion that
occupies the center of these two films.11
This critical historical approach is enabled by the scholarship of revisionists
working in the field of western history. Such historians have, through their materialist analyses, recast the story of western expansion at the center of these films so
as to negate triumphal assumptions of national history and destiny. In the acute
perspective of Patricia Limerick, for instance, the West is a site of “conquest and
its consequences.” As she explains, “Conquest was a literal territorial form of economic growth. Westward expansion was the most concrete, down-to-earth demonstration of the economic habit on which the entire nation became dependent.”12
With a nod to William Appleman Williams, who wrote of imperialism as being
“intrinsically our American way of life,” Limerick places the annexation of lands
across North America in a context that allows us to see their relationship to subsequent imperial adventures abroad.13
These historians help us to see that U.S. expansion was not a matter of destiny but of policy. Such insights afford a perspective that enables one to critique
the assumptions of national identity embedded in these films. Without such a
critical view, these films remain cultural expressions that engage audiences in a
process of viewing U.S. expansion as an ultimate good. This is not to say that they
may not also engage alternative and resistant responses; however, as we view
these films as broadly typical of the genre and in relation to a clear historical
tendency of the period—toward nationalism and a kind of imperialism—they
readily promote affective assent.
Post–World War II Nationalism and Westerns. The repressed dimension of
westerns is their relationship to imperialism—and it is their indirect means of considering such activity that makes them the genre of the period after the end of World
War II, a time denoted by various commentators as “the American half century.” It
is within this context that these works resonate. As postwar expressions, they allow
us to understand, however speculatively, the powerful devices promoting particular
constructions of national identity in a period marked by intense chauvinism and
broad acceptance of a kind of economic and cultural hegemony.
In Red River and My Darling Clementine we view the economic outcomes
that should emerge from the effective assertion and visceral acceptance of the
core terms of national identity. In the former, heroes emerge and perform their
morally desirable actions and, as a result, the cattle industry is born; in the latter,
Tombstone becomes a place where an entrepreneur need not fear the forces of
chaos. In Red River, although Tom Dunson exhibits signs of obsession as he drives
Cinema Journal 39, No. 3, Spring 2000
71
his cattle toward Abilene, there can be little doubt that the film depicts the drive
itself and the actions necessary to complete it (as opposed to those that are extreme and unnecessary) as comprehensible and well justified. In My Darling
Clementine, the Earp brothers happen by Tombstone in the course of driving cattle
from Chihuahua to California. The Clantons’ intervention—to rustle their cattle—
is economically motivated and opposed to the “laws” of free trade. Wyatt’s task in
Tombstone is to vanquish these forces of chaos. These economic goals are mystified by their association with character traits that resonate within the national
mythos. At their most explicit level, both films are character driven and focus on
the power of the (male) individual to bend conditions to his will by exercising the
prerogatives of freedom; thus, we can boil down much of the ideological thrust of
these presentations to the powerful terms “freedom” and “individualism” that, not
coincidentally, are the focal terms of Turner’s essay.
Both films also exhibit formal strategies that establish these thematic foci from
the outset, namely, extremely wide or long shots emphasize the openness of the
land, a geographical condition that creates the terms of freedom as it invites the
exercise of individual will. My Darling Clementine, for example, opens with a long
establishing shot of the unsettled terrain of Arizona. It ends with an extreme long
shot of Wyatt riding back into the desert. Such shots show the relative isolation of
Tombstone while also providing a view of the relationship in scale between humans and nature. Similarly, Red River begins with a crane shot of a wagon train
crossing the desert. Its early scenes, before Dunson claims his lands, are frequently
punctuated either by long shots of the barren land or by wide shots of Dunson,
Groot, and, later, Matthew Garth dwarfed by the landscape. Such shots are, of
course, conventions of the western genre, since for the viewer to apprehend the
process of conquest in a thorough and affective manner, he/she must fully comprehend the scale of the territory that must be tamed. These locales are defined as
existing in a kind of “natural” state, since their social order is so undeveloped.
Thus, the very geography of the west—and the camera’s treatment of that space—
provides the site and the mise-en-scène in which individuals of magnitude can
assert their sense of order.
Through such visual emphasis, these films become veritable odes to the virtues of the heroic individual. As social entities are dwarfed by sweeping landscapes,
the main (male) characters often assume larger-than-life proportions. But not only
do these men dominate other men, they also bring order to the landscape. In Red
River, a powerful expression of the large stature of Dunson marks the famous
scene that begins the cattle drive that occupies the center of this film (the scene
Peter Bogdanovich used in the last picture show in his 1971 film of that title). As
viewers, we are implicated in an editing strategy that reveals Dunson to be the
motivating power moving the mass of cattle and men. A sequence of parallel shots
of men in the foreground, cattle in the middle distance, and mountains in the
background is interrupted by a rider coming into the frame and proceeding to its
vanishing point—defined by an arch in the deepest part of the center of the frame.
The film cuts to Dunson, who was clearly the rider, in a medium close-up. Immediately after Dunson says, “Ready, Matthew?” to begin the drive, he literally fills
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the frame; only a glint of daylight appears over his shoulders. Dunson’s dark clothing and hat block out the sun itself. The camera then pans 360 degrees, in effect
defining Dunson’s point of view as super-human and all-encompassing. This shot
ends with a return to Dunson in a medium shot, framed above the men and cattle
but on the same tier as the mountains in the background. He exhorts, “Take ’em to
Missouri.” In response, the individual cowboys are shown hooting without restraint,
edited together in a succession of close-ups. Dunson’s scale and effect are determined by the locale. That is, he is all but a force of nature and a powerful example
of the need to ensure the frontier (American) way of life.
Such assertions of the power of heroes recur frequently. When the Earps meet
their eventual foils, the Clantons, at the beginning of My Darling Clementine,
Wyatt is seen conversing with the elder Clanton from his horse; the shot then
shifts to a close-up of Wyatt framed from below. Such a change in point of view
provides us with a new manner of locating this character as he literally becomes
larger than life. Similarly, on the cattle drive at the center of the plot of Red River,
the camera frequently frames the men and the herd from afar and from above, a
viewpoint that accentuates the majesty of the landscape and the smallness of the
humans and their endeavors. The shot then typically jumps to that of Dunson
from below, framed tightly against the same mountains. Juxtaposed together,
Dunson is elevated to the stature and grandeur of the monumental terrain.
In My Darling Clementine, the thematic emphasis of the film becomes obvious early on, as Wyatt addresses the grave of his brother, James. Wyatt has agreed
to stay in Tombstone after James’s murder, which took place during the rustling of
the Earps’s cattle. As Wyatt rides to his brother’s grave in the desert, the rough
terrain of Monument Valley is featured. The scene begins with a long shot of Wyatt
amid this unsettled land. As he props up his brother’s headstone, he is pictured
from a fairly low angle, in profile, in a medium shot, positioned on the left side of
the frame. A rocky point defines the vanishing point, and the headstone defines
screen right. Although Wyatt is sitting down, his head seems to be on a par with
some of the rocky outcroppings visible in the background of the frame. The thinness and flatness of James’s headstone creates a visual counterpoint to Wyatt’s
solidity and power. This juxtaposition of the live and dead brother separated by the
land and their corporal states effectively explains Earp’s mission: Wyatt must bring
order to the wilderness. The scene then cuts to a tighter and more angled shot of
Wyatt in front of the grave, talking to his dead brother: “Maybe when we leave this
country, young kids like you will be able to grow up and live safe.” The manner in
which Ford locates Wyatt in the landscape and composes him proportional to it
shows his fitness. His assertion of the words “the country,” within the logic of this
scene’s visual structure, reveals Wyatt’s role as a tamer of the forces of disruption,
that are as wild as the land itself.
In addition to their visual emphases, these films use their stars to make a
range of intertextual references. That is, as Hollywood productions typically do,
the two westerns focus not only on the fictional characters but on their stars, encouraging viewers to associate the roles played by their featured performers with
those that have defined their screen images. By the late forties, both Henry Fonda
Cinema Journal 39, No. 3, Spring 2000
73
and John Wayne had achieved stardom by personifying the popular terms of American heroes. Fonda had played characters ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Tom
Joad, not to mention his role in the Revolutionary War story Drums Along the
Mohawk (1939, Ford) and the World War II film Immortal Sergeant (1943). Wayne
had emerged as a notable figure in Stagecoach (1939, Ford) but did not develop
star status or a well-articulated persona until the World War II era. In that period
he appeared in many films set in that conflict, including The Fighting Seabees
(1943), Back to Bataan (1945), and They Were Expendable (1945, Ford). Although
Wayne was not always the lead character, these films and his continued appearance in Westerns defined the star’s ability to evoke the heroic terms of nation.14
My Darling Clementine and Red River ask audiences to admire and identify
with these heroic figures and the terms of American life they personify: physical
courage, moral certainty, and the power of the individual to alter circumstances
according to a morally justified vision of the future. This vision of heroism exudes from the characters they play as well as from the residual intertextual presence of Tom Joad and Abraham Lincoln (in Fonda’s case), and the Ringo Kid or
Lieutenant Rusty Ryan (in Wayne’s case). That is, they were figures of legendary
dimension, whether drawn from fact or from resonant fictions. Such presences
may have the effect of providing these films with a resonance that allows them,
through these personas, to offer an idealized and mythic presentation of national character and destiny, a vision that apparently transcends historically specific circumstances.
Since the film industry frequently, as a matter of its commercial viability, attempts to replicate the terms of its critical and commercial successes, these films led
to the production of others like them. When considered within their historical context as early versions of the postwar western, they articulate a means of understanding the phenomenon of general assent to the extremes of Cold War ideology and
government policy: the excesses of McCarthyism, the demonization of those accused of being red or pink, and the exponential buildup of the military-industrial
complex. As elements of the cultural sphere, these films complement and supplement more direct material and polemic appeals to the mass of Americans to apply
deeply rooted ideas of American exceptionalism to the conditions of the late forties
and early fifties. These may include explicit appeals to take up arms against “godless
Communists” and the actual persecution and incarceration of those with views that
questioned the efficacy of capitalism.15 These two films are emblematic of an emphasis visible in post-World War II westerns. That is, they ask audiences to engage
affectively in a view of the American nation that allows for acts of empire or hegemony to be seen as the expression of a rational and moral imperative that will ensure
progress and promote the development of civilization. In ways that are fairly typical
of the genre, My Darling Clementine and Red River present the annexation of western lands as a matter of inevitability. Specifically, the question they present is how
parts of Arizona and Texas will be integrated into the national fabric, not whether
they will be or whether they should be.
Such a cultural climate was not a matter of happenstance. Immediately after
the end of World War II, the government was actively involved in the mass pro-
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duction of anti-Communist propaganda. Such expressions typically painted the
Red Threat as one that would enforce mass conformity and eliminate all meritocracy.
Paul Boyer tells of such propaganda appearing in Henry Luce’s Life magazine in
1946: “John Foster Dulles published an alarming two-part article . . . warning of
Russia’s plan for world domination. ‘I can think of no articles in my experience in
journalism,’ an admiring Luce wrote the future secretary of state, ‘which so definitely accomplished a job. For a great many people, directly or indirectly, your
article ended all doubts as to the inescapable reality of the Russia-Communist
problem.’”16 The historian Melvin Small further elaborates the broader terms and
pervasiveness of this campaign: “Some of the propaganda reflected sincere attempts by presidents and others to awaken the United States to its international
responsibilities and its expanded security interests. But they sold the message in
more apocalyptic terms than were necessary or desirable.”17
The Films as Economic Parables. Reading these two films in the context of
Cold War history highlights the economic dimension of each. I bring this aspect of
the films’ historical assertions to the fore of my discussion because, in keeping with
Wallerstein’s analysis, I see the terms of U.S. Cold War posture primarily as a means
to an economic end—to define and maintain America as the center of a global system of capitalist commerce. In My Darling Clementine, we see the Earp brothers
bring the blessings of civilization to Tombstone, Arizona, by vanquishing the
Clantons in 1882 (although the actual gunfight took place in 1881). This conflict
begins when the Clantons rustle a herd of Earps’ cattle en route from Mexico to
California. With the Clantons dead and gone at the film’s conclusion, such international commerce can burgeon. The film implicitly sees the possibility of free commerce as a precondition to the act of community building in iconographic U.S.
terms. With the Clantons eliminated, the Earps can also depart, leaving the future of
Tombstone to the title character of the film, Clementine Carter. Clementine has
come from the East and is obviously of the patrician class. She pledges to “be the
new schoolmarm,” a job both emblematic of civilization and explicitly civilizing in
itself. The film’s final shots show Wyatt moving away from the camera, getting
smaller and smaller in the striking Monument Valley mise-en-scène, as he leaves
town. This action is interspersed with images of Clementine, who remains tethered
to the settlement, even as she longingly looks after Earp. In this final scene, the point
of view of the film shifts. Whereas Wyatt’s vision had largely defined the film, it is
clearly Clementine’s eyes that now define what the camera records.
Such a conclusion locates the next phase of incorporation. We may see this transition as that of moving from domination to occupation. As the Earps have vanquished the atavistic elements of the town, they may now move offstage and let a
more explicit process of settlement occur. Although it is possible to see this process
of vanquishing the Clantons as analogous to the military efforts of World War II, it
seems to lend itself more readily to a projection of postwar conditions. That is, in
shifting its focus to Clementine, whose patrician eastern manner defines much of
her stature, as well as its vision of domination by a means other than the gun, the
scene places us squarely in the postwar era, when hegemony replaces naked military
Cinema Journal 39, No. 3, Spring 2000
75
assertion. It is from Clementine’s point of view that we observe Earp’s retreat, as she
takes on a more “feminine” approach to nation building.
Red River even more emphatically equates acts of commerce with the values
of American identity. The film depicts the heroic cattle drive from South Texas to
Abilene so that Tom Dunson’s herd can be shipped east and eventually overseas,
thereby connecting western ranching with national and international systems of
exchange. In 1865, as his herd is booming, Dunson finds that his cattle have almost no value: the Civil War has exhausted the South’s capital, and the markets to
the East can be reached only through a long and treacherous drive. The film recounts this drive and the extraordinary qualities of the man who engineers and
leads it. Indeed, although Matthew Garth eventually leads the drive into Abilene,
it is Dunson whose will makes the trek possible. This is clear from the outset of the
expedition when Dunson enters the cowboy’s bunkhouse to enlist his workers.
The scene is shot in deep focus, with Dunson in his usual position at the center of
the frame. He is one of the few men standing, and he towers above the rank-andfile cowhands. Indeed, within the composition of the scene, he seems to be larger
than the physical confines of the room itself, since the deep-focus shot places his
head against the rafters of the building.
These films, then, show the need and correctness of integrating western
locales into a system that enables goods to move unimpeded, and this movement
is the expression of the individual wills of these great men. The integration of
the region into this unfettered laissez-faire system of commerce characterizes
its more general incorporation into the United States. Because Wallerstein’s world
systems formulation shows how a modern integrated world economy is organized, with the various states playing particular and unequal roles, it has the
power to explain both the explicit and embedded historical narratives of these
two classic films, for both provide stories of territorial conquest and the assimilation of regions into larger organizational structures. The two films tell of the
moment when the peripheral territories that either were or are about to become
part of the political sphere of the United States actively embrace their destiny.
In My Darling Clementine, this takes the form of town-building (civil order,
schools, churches); while in Red River, it means actively seeking economic integration by gaining access to rail lines. In Wallerstein’s view, the disparate economic role and centrality of a given region-state can be defined by its category in
the world system of trade—core, periphery, and semiperiphery. The diplomatic
historian Thomas McCormick explains how these terms apply specifically to post–
World War II geopolitics:
The system consists of three successive zones, each performing a specialized function
in a complex, international division of labor. Core countries (the First World) own most
of the high tech, high profit enterprises. The periphery (the Third World) specializes in
primary production of agricultural commodities and raw material—they are the “hewers of wood and carriers of water.” Between them the semiperiphery (the Second World)
performs intermediate functions of transport, local capital mobilization, and less complex, less profitable forms of manufacturing.18
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Figure 2. Tom Dunson’s bullying during a post–Civil War (1865) cattle drive dramatizes the post–World War II global strategy of U.S. economic interests. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The nineteenth-century frontier, which is a conceptual device made material by
its placement in North American and U.S. history, is a site directly equatable with
the economic frontiers of the late forties and fifties. The Arizona of My Darling
Clementine and the Texas of Red River clearly exist on the periphery, as they provide the raw materials—land, cattle, and minerals—for more sophisticated production and commerce. In this role, Arizona equates with the oil-rich nations of
the Middle East and the resource-rich nations of Asia and Africa, because they are
all connected to and serve a remote seat of economic power. And although these
films tell of political annexation through statehood, the international analogy can
be found in the various political and economic agreements (SEATO, NATO) that
proliferated in the early days of the Cold War. Like the various nations that affiliated with the United States through these regional treaty organizations, the southwestern regions depicted in the two westerns gave up local autonomy in exchange
for assurances of protection and access to markets. Although these postwar security organizations did not result in the incorporation of the various member nations as states within the United States, they did offer a system of relationships
that was otherwise quite similar.
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By using the western as a framing device for this analogy, Cold War questions
of morality and social effect are submerged in the time-honored and reified rhetoric of national destiny, but they are elucidated by equating the West with other
underdeveloped regions. As a region technically outside the United States, the West
was viewed as an area just awaiting formal entry into the union. In these films we
see no resistance to incorporation itself, only resistance to the particular apparatuses of incorporation—such as Earp’s law or Dunson’s bullying. Thus, they dramatize a version of the postwar global strategy of “Empire by Invitation.” As
McCormick explains:
American leaders had a vision of how to reorder and manage the world-system in ways
they thought would negate its self-destructive tendencies and usher in a golden age of
economic profitability, political stability, and social tranquillity. While they acknowledged the self-interest that would be served by their new order, they were firm in their
proud conviction that other core powers would participate in the benefits of that order.
. . . In a cost-benefit analysis, the rest of the world would win more than it would lose by
acquiescing in American hegemony: greater security and material rewards in exchange
for diminished autonomy.19
As Wallerstein reminds us, such circumscribed choices take place within a system
that defines the narrow contours of possibility, where modernity and progress
define a certain type of hierarchy and mode of production: “The great emphasis
on the rationality of scientific activity was the mask of the irrationality of endless
accumulation.”20
These postwar westerns reenact an archetypal American narrative of the coming of order and civilization to formerly benighted places. In so doing, they produce and reproduce the reigning and highly influential assumptions of a body of
liberal internationalists—a group including such notables as Alan and John Foster
Dulles, Dean Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, the Rockefellers, Elihu Root, Henry
Stimson, James Forrestal, and, not insignificantly, the highly influential owner and
publisher of Time/Life magazines, Henry Luce. These figures shared a fervent
belief in the mission of the United States to order the world, mixing a type of
Protestant spiritual uplift, free-market economics, and devout anticommunism.21
Beyond these explicit matters of belief, there also existed an often-implicit goal: to
place the United States at the center of a world economic system. Michael Hunt
elaborates on this strategy:
The geopolitical world was like a chessboard. Each major power would seek to control
the greatest expanse of space. The more territory it controlled, the greater its population and natural resources, and the greater in turn would be its power to acquire yet
more territory and further augment its power in a cycle that would leave a rival weakened and isolated. In the world of pure power politics, conquest of the entire globe
seemed at last a real possibility.22
Nevertheless, with this vision of commerce in the thematic, narrative, and visual
foregrounds of both films and at the center of Red River, both movies express the
attractiveness of their outcomes in powerful ideological terms. In My Darling
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Clementine, for instance, the famous scene of the dance at the church construction site defines the future of Tombstone just a short time before the gunfight at
the OK Corral. As Wyatt and Clementine dance a conspicuous two-step, the camera also shows the skeletal steeple, church bell, and two American flags set together against the sky, signaling the inevitable and glorious future of Tombstone.
Similarly, the more general visual style of Red River is confirmed and reelaborated at the crucial moment when Dunson gets ready to drive his cattle to the
railhead at Abilene. Hawks establishes the scene by shooting the mass of cattle
and men from a distance, so that they are dwarfed by the imposing landscape. The
director cuts to Dunson on horseback, shot from below and framed tightly so that
he dominates the frame, although it is possible to glimpse the mountains in the
background. Although the other cowboys are also on horses, Dunson is both above
them and constantly reemerging at the center of the frame. When a neighbor,
named Meeker, accompanied by two other men, comes to complain that his cattle
are mixed in with the Dunson herd, the point of anticipated confrontation is the
space between the two equal and symmetrically configured groups. As the scene
progresses, however, the camera tracks ever so slightly with each reverse shot, so
that by the middle of the exchange, which documents Meeker’s acquiescence to
Dunson’s authority and his plan, Dunson occupies the center of the shot and is
framed nearly as prominently as he was when he towered over his own men in the
act of branding the herd. Dunson tells Meeker that he will account for these strays
and pay appropriately, based on the price he gets per head in Abilene. Not incidentally, one of the gunmen who rode in with Meeker decides to switch his allegiance from Meeker to Dunson, suggesting the extent of Dunson’s domain and the
power of his vision. Thus are industrial combinations formed and presided over by
figures who are big enough to see them to fruition—the scene is a capitalist parable with international implications to be sure, but one that subordinates the methods of accumulation to the ethos of rugged individualism.
These scenes from both movies culminate in low-angle shots that feature their
points of emphasis—the flags, church, and sky in the Ford, and, in the Hawks,
Dunson, on horseback against the sky, colossal in size and significance. In imposing the terms of U.S. nationalism on western locales, these filmmakers thus reveal
both the act of conquest and the explanations that are used to define and justify it.
These narratives express the legitimacy and necessity of the American empire in
narratives that reaffirm postwar foreign policy, a network of activities that was
intended to create a global system of trade with the United States at its center.
According to Wallerstein, the industrial revolution in Europe ultimately resulted in an overproduction of goods. This crisis led to the development of a system
of economic exchange that extended beyond national borders, as developed nations
sought new markets, new sources of labor, and previously untapped concentrations
of raw materials. These economically subordinated regions or nations are said to
occupy the periphery or semiperiphery of world trade. An area’s relative status depends on its degree and type of involvement in this system: whether it supplies only
raw materials, whether it functions as a primary, secondary, or tertiary market, or
whether it maintains significant regional autonomy.23 Wallerstein uses this theory to
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explain the age of empire, which is coterminous with the rise of capitalism in the
sixteenth century, and he has traced its development in the subsequent centuries.
In the modern application of this system, such as the postwar period, a core nation
such as the U.S., which has the basis for—and further developed—an integrated
modern economy, attempted to retain its centrality by entering a dominating but
mutually advantageous relationship with a number of semiperipheral and peripheral nations. To remain a hegemonic power, the U.S. needed endlessly to expand its
economy, constantly incorporating more nations into the global system. If we look
back to the late nineteenth century, we can see the roots of this strategy in the
westward expansion of the nation; in short, Arizona in the late nineteenth century
played a role in the American national economy similar to that played by Saudi
Arabia in the mid-twentieth.
The Film as/in History: My Darling Clementine. It is typical of the movie
western to name its historical moment, usually through the stating of a precise
date and place in which the plot is set. Westerns that fail to provide some chronological and geographic point of reference are exceptions. These spatial and temporal references explicitly place the film narrative within a popular vision of American
history. Such assertions of the place of the events depicted in “real” history are
strategic and suggest that most westerns can be analyzed similarly to the way one
might approach a historical novel, that is, as fictional texts that strategically rewrite
documentary evidence. The goal of such documentation is to support a narrative
that enables the viewer to evoke some reified version of the past. Such texts may
intentionally jar a viewer’s sense of what happened, as in the much-discussed JFK
(1991, Oliver Stone), or provide merely an emotional entry into chronologically
remote occurrences. In any case, such textual configurations of historical events
are necessarily organized and revised according to ideological precepts. Westerns,
then, willingly involve themselves in the depiction of history and are thereby illuminated in important ways by being considered as history. Robert Rosenstone
characterizes the qualities of a historical film and the approach it suggests:
To be considered historical rather than simply a costume drama that uses the past as an
exotic setting for romance and adventure, a film must engage, directly or obliquely, the
issues, ideas, data, and arguments of the ongoing discourse of history. Like any work of
history, a film must be judged in terms of the knowledge of the past we already possess.
Like any work of history, it must situate itself within a body of other works, the ongoing
(multimedia) debate over the importance of events and the meaning of the past.24
In these two films, historical markers and references to the real are important in
enabling an incredulous viewer to investigate how historical materials are rewritten
and reemployed. An analytical frame that interrogates these films historically enables the detection of their strategy for addressing contemporary audiences: the age
of the frontier easily becomes the age of international trade. Just as Cold War strategies that promoted economic hegemony were usually mystified in terms that referenced national myths—freedom and liberty—so the terms of enterprise in both
films are clouded by recurring images that summon such terms. In this light, John
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Ford’s frontier is a place where Cold War strategies are replicated and mystified.
Because Ford does use a historical event as a point of reference in his film, we are
able to see the antipathy between the Earps and the Clantons as more than a device
for dramatic structure, and because part of the intention here is to show how myth
idealizes and often misrepresents history, attending to the layers below the surface
of this film uncovers its more complex relationship to historical events. As noted,
there was indeed a real Wyatt Earp, and he did live in Tombstone. Although the
date given in the film is inaccurate, there was an actual gunfight at the O.K. Corral,
and it did pit the Earps against the Clantons. As in the film, its primary significance
was as a conflict over the future of Tombstone, although it would turn out that
Tombstone—because of its remoteness and its short-lived viability as a site for silver
mining—would have a fairly short future. By 1909, the town was all but deserted.25
The Earp brothers came to Tombstone in late 1879 not as cattle drivers en
route from Chihuahua to California (as the film would have it), but as small entrepreneurs “looking to get ahead.” As Pauline Mitchell Marks tells us, “Silver mining
almost invariably required technology and industrial equipment beyond [the small
operator’s] reach,” so the Earp brothers were unable to develop the mines in which
they owned shares.26 Instead, they bought and sold those shares for profit. Wyatt
also owned a share of the gambling concession at one of the town’s larger saloons.
The film does in fact depict gambling in a Tombstone saloon, but the socially ambiguous Doc Holliday controls it. In the scene in which Wyatt plays cards, the
camera shoots him from straight on and Chihuahua, Doc’s doomed woman friend,
slides into the frame to stand behind him to signal to another player. Rather than
Wyatt controlling the game of chance and profiting from it, My Darling Clementine
shows Wyatt as a victim of an illicit game of “chance” controlled by those with
fewer scruples. Thus, the role of Earp is rewritten to make him the victim of disorder rather than one of its causes.
As befitting a town such as Tombstone in its boom years, there were significant
class distinctions among its inhabitants, who included executives and engineers for
the mining companies and transients who were simply drawn by the whirl of a mining strike. Furthermore, in the post–Civil War years, there remained significant frictions between those who were from the settled North, Republican and pro-Union,
and those of the rural South, who tended to be Democratic and Confederate.
Another way of seeing this distinction is in the late-nineteenth-century terms
of class, particularly as it related to the farm crisis of that period. The Republican
group tended to support the forces of consolidation and its attendant institutions,
while the Southern Democrats tended to resist the forces that increasingly resulted in the death of regional markets and the demise of the small producer. The
Earps, for all of their marginality, saw Tombstone as a place where they could not
only rise to economic respectability but also develop a range of productive and
Republican social contacts.
An important historical moment in the life of Tombstone was, as the film
depicts, the construction of a church in 1882, the year the movie is set, although
it is a year after the actual gunfight at the O.K. corral. Historically, this was the
Episcopalian church, which moved to a permanent structure in that year. The
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Figure 3. Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Clementine Carter’s (Linda Darnell)
dance represents the merging of the lawman and the patrician class in John Ford’s
My Darling Clementine (1946). Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
major momentum for completion of this structure was supplied by the transplanted New England Brahmin Endicott Peabody, who visited Tombstone both
to tame the heathens and to acquire the western “finishing” that many of the
patrician class sought at that time. Peabody went on to a legendary career as the
headmaster of the Groton School, where future presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt
and John F. Kennedy would attend secondary school and various other scions of
prominent families would learn of their mission to mankind. Although there is
no evidence that John Ford knew of the actual construction of this church or of
Peabody’s presence, this fact illuminates the class distinctions and the terms of
incorporation the film dramatizes. It was the patronage of the mine owners and
managers, those who worshipped with the young Peabody, to which Earp aspired. In such terms, the scene at the church shifts in meaning, as we see it not as
the coming of civilization—flags and plain folk—but as the coming of a kind of
Brahmin social order, replicating hierarchies of the East. As Wyatt and Clementine
dance, we spy on a celebration of the merging of the lawman and the patrician
class transplanted to Arizona.
By contrast, the Clantons were typical of the small ranchers in the area outside the town limits of Tombstone, who were, in the words of Richard Maxwell
Brown, “resistant and rural.”27 The cattle ranchers in southeastern Arizona existed
primarily to sell beef to the population centered near the mines or to sell, by De-
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Figure 4. Earp’s military mission in 1882 is similar to the job asked of the postwar
American military. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
partment of Interior contract, to those on nearby Indian reservations. As these
markets burgeoned, smaller ranchers like the Clantons were increasingly displaced
by large Texas cattle concerns that expanded to establish ranches in Arizona, thus
driving smaller ranchers out of the market. Examples of such entrepreneurs were
the prominent (and Republican) cattle barons John Chisum and John Slaughter. If
we adopt this more sympathetic view of the Clantons, we can see their resistance
to Earp as an effort to forestall the encroachment of a way of life and economic
scale that would displace small landowners and make them mere wage laborers in
a national market economy. From such a perspective, the film ceases to be a dichotomy of good and evil; it becomes a conflict between two economic systems.
Indeed, it expresses the very conflict that characterized the populist revolt of the
late nineteenth century.28
In this historical light, the terms of civilization that Earp represents resonate
in the post–World War II era. To be sure, Earp’s military mission, to make his
corner of the world stable for moneyed eastern oligarchs to invest in and derive a
predictable and sufficient profit from, is similar to the job asked of the postwar
American military. Continuing problems of overproduction in the last three decades of the nineteenth century had resulted in erratic cycles of economic boom
and bust—and all the social disruption such cycles cause. Patrician intellectuals,
such as Brooks Adams, Josiah Strong, Theodore Roosevelt, and military strategist
Alfred Thayer Mahan, had devised a means by which the United States could
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become the preeminent world power through a multitiered strategy of economic
and military penetration into the underdeveloped areas of the globe—and, in particular, into the Pacific Rim.29 In international terms, this era marked the beginnings of the formation of a coherent foreign policy. Figures of prominence in
American political and economic circles sought to make political and military power
a means to secure economic centrality in the world. Thomas McCormick shows
this policy’s imperial dimension:
By 1900, American leaders were moving away from the nationalistic ideology of tariff
protectionism and overseas imperialism. The ruling Republican Party moved to embrace a different ideology of tariff reciprocity and Open Door policy. In the Dingley
tariff of 1897 and the Open Door notes of 1899–1900, [Brooks] Adams saw the glimmer
of transformation from a defensive nationalism to expansive internationalism, to the
ebullient notion that American economic supremacy was best served by an unlimited
global market rather than a restricted national and colonial market.30
Finally, this view envisioned a third development that would complete America’s
replacement of Great Britain at the center of the global system. Persuaded that
economic power and ideological coercion alone could not produce hegemony,
Adams argued that the United States must take an increasingly large role in policing the world order. The United States’ role of international sheriff was sketched
in the late nineteenth century but became a central global strategy in the late
forties and fifties. The figure of Wyatt Earp, as played by Henry Fonda, embodied
this role and made it admirable.
The Film as/in History: Red River. Red River also employs a body of historical
referents that allow a thorough explication of its myths. In tracing its relationship
to historically verifiable events, we may see its acts of rewriting in distinctly Cold
War terms. Red River begins with a stated date of 1851, more than five years after
Texas became a state. It is not an abstract sense of destiny that draws Dunson to
Texas but the goal of economic empire: to develop a great herd of cattle. In employing 1851 as a point of departure, Hawks and his screenwriters (Borden Chase
and Charles Schnee) situate Dunson in the historical period after political conquest but prior to the integration of the Texas cattle industry into the still-forming
national economy. Dunson’s journey takes him several hundred miles south of the
Red River, past the Pecos to the border of Mexico and the Rio Grande. As he plots
his empire, which, in his words, will be as far as he can see, two agents of Don
Diego, who lives four hundred miles to the South, come to tell him that the land
has an owner. Dunson kills one agent and frightens the other away, laying his claim
with his weapon. Dunson’s ever-present sidekick, Groot (Walter Brennan), comments that Diego’s deed is illegitimate because he claims “too much land for one
man.” In view of Dunson’s own enormous claim, this becomes an intriguing statement but not one that seems dissonant within the imposing frame defined by
Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. For Turner, the legitimacy of conquest is never
morally questioned because it always produces a moral good—Americanism, or
democracy. By challenging Turner’s assumptions and the predominant terms of
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American exceptionalism, we can see that the act of acquisition is not a matter of
right or wrong but of guns and land. Indeed, within the economic logic of this film,
the reason that Dunson’s claim should prevail is that he plans to use the land, in
capitalist terms, productively.
Such a conflation of morality and economic use in a capitalist sense resounds
with Cold War logic. In Dunson’s assumed logic of production and distribution,
we can see some of the goals and rationales of the Marshall Plan reapplied to a
different locale and commodity. That plan, one of the key elements of late 1940s
global realignment, provided aid to European nations in order to implicate them
in an international system of trade that had the U.S. at its center. An important
feature of the plan was the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), a solely
American body that had the power to make policy. In return for economic support, participating nations would produce certain products for the world market
that would complement U.S. production. With the revenue from those products,
the European nations could then purchase materials and products from the U.S.
Such a system had the effect of isolating the Soviet Union as it made appeals to
economic nationalism moot. Furthermore, through the ECA, the scheme insured
that social welfare spending would remain relatively low, so as to keep wages and
inflation down and profits and investments up.
A similar system of trade is at work and typified as desirable in Red River.
With the railroad as a capital improvement from another source, Dunson is able to
develop a product—cattle—in proportions that his regional market cannot begin
to absorb. Indeed, this is the central problem of the film: what to do with cattle
that have no regional market. If we step outside the logic of the market economy
and the centralization of production, we may see that the solution was for Dunson
to diversify—that is, develop a model of production geared to subsistence and not
to surplus. Then a producer could actually use some of his product, as well as avoid
the need to find buyers for so much of a single commodity.
Similar questions could also be asked of producers of commodities in the U.S.
and in Europe who were drawn into the logic of postwar international trading.
Why not develop diversified manufacturing geared toward local and national markets? As various historians have noted, the Marshall Plan was enacted as a means
of promoting the hegemony of the United States as an economic power. Michael
Hogan elucidates this strategy: “The Marshall Plan rested squarely on an American conviction that European economic recovery was essential to the long-term
interests of the United States. . . . ‘The political line up followed the economic line
up,’ as Cordell Hull once put it.”31 Thus, the Marshall Plan offered inducements—
loans, a means of staving off the threat of a massive reallocation of resources, and
therefore the persistence of the capitalist class. Those in the U.S. who sought viable but less industrially able trading partners freely equated the political system
of liberal democracy with the economic system of world capitalism. But in public
expressions, economic imperatives were often deeply buried under the expressions of politics and morality. As the historian Patrick Diggins notes, by 1947 “the
United States found itself aligning with countries that were neither liberal nor democratic but simply anticommunist.”32 And indeed, that anticommunist stance was
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largely a matter of U.S.-supported political and economic interests becoming supreme in a given country or region.
That Dunson uses the land to the end of participating in the system of interregional capitalist exchange is depicted as largely a matter of his will, his assertion of
self—his individualism.33 Dunson’s right to acquire stems from his desire to accumulate a fortune. As in international relations, acts of will are to be praised for
their economic results, and these ends justify any necessary acts of violence or
coercion. This idea of productivity becomes the moral center of Red River. Much
as Turner, and subsequent post–World War II policy makers, conflated the terms
democracy, freedom, and individualism, the film offers its own fusion of terms.
What is right becomes that which contributes to the formation of an integrated
corporate economic enterprise.
After establishing its opening date of 1851, Red River traverses the next fourteen years with a voice-over and a montage of a ranch in the process of growing. The
film’s central narrative events are then dated from 1865. The use of this date is
intriguing for its historical inaccuracy. The Kansas Pacific Railroad did not have a
depot in Abilene until 1866 and did not begin shipping cattle until 1867. By moving
the chronology to 1865, Hawks places the film’s dramatic action immediately after
the Civil War. Such a chronological shift emphasizes the process of nation-building
cast in the terms of capitalist enterprise. The before-and-after chronology of the
film (1851 and 1865) juxtaposes and conflates the premodern regional economy
with the modern national economy. Arguably, in the postwar period in which this
film was made, the national economy is subordinated to the international. When we
look, as Donald Worster suggests, at the “power that has often hidden itself behind
beguiling masks,”34 Tom Dunson becomes not simply a classic cowpoke but a direct
forbear of the modern agribusinessman—who was an important player in post–
World War II trade. Thus, the film focuses on the cattle drive as a moment in national destiny—which is, as Dunson says, providing beef for the nation: “Good beef
for hungry people, beef to make ’em strong, to make ’em grow.”
In historical studies of the cattle trade and particularly of early commerce in
Abilene, the figure who is most prominent is not the cattle driver but Joseph
McCoy, the entrepreneur who organized the shipping center. His 1874 Historic
Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest recounted the development of the beef industry to that point and his role in it. Red River does offer a
McCoy-like character who buys Dunson’s cattle for “the Greenwood Trading
Company of Illinois.” It seems clear within the iconography and ideology of the
western why Hawks did not make a film that focused on McCoy/Melville’s negotiations with the railroad and his overseeing of the building of Abilene. Such a
film, of course, would be difficult to fit within the structure of our myth of the
frontier and America. Yet, by seeing the process that Dunson’s drive represents,
we can approach this film critically. As Robert Sklar has noted, in westerns, “westward expansion . . . is hard to recognize” and becomes simply “a darn good excuse for a movie.”35 Viewed as a postwar drama, Red River shows the incorporation
of a remote region into the world economy as an act of both national greatness
and financial logic.36
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But even as it treats the cattle drive as epic and Dunson as mythic, Red
River also tells the story of a mutiny on the range. After two men who deserted
the drive are returned to Dunson, he declares that he will hang them. At this
point, Garth takes control of the herd and the drivers, who are on the verge of
rebellion, and reroutes the drive to Abilene. Garth lacks the force of Dunson,
but he is far more able to manage his workers. Indeed, in a film about modern
enterprise, Garth telescopes us ahead some forty years to the realm of industrial
psychology, as he knows that a happy worker is a productive worker. He allows
recreation, manages by coercion rather than by physical domination, and seeks
to have his workers obey him out of their belief in him and his position; he therefore interacts with them as a benevolent dictator. Throughout the film, the stylistic distinctions between Dunson and Garth are emphasized in virtually every
aspect of their performances. Dunson shouts, Garth almost whispers; Dunson
stands or sits upright, Garth slouches; Dunson’s face is taut and determined,
Garth’s is relaxed and frequently smiling.
Dunson lacks the ability to view his situation fluidly so that he can judge the
capabilities of his workers more accurately. He remains rigid and increasingly cut
off, a victim of his singlemindedness and inability to hear and process new information. For example, at the first mention of altering the course of the drive from
Missouri to Abilene, Kansas, a shift in destination that takes into account the frailty
of the men as individuals and as a social organization, Garth gravitates toward the
prospect, even though he is not absolutely sure that the railroad runs through
Abilene. Dunson rejects the idea, believing he can continue to drive his men and
herd, and refuses to take a chance on the location of the rail line. As Garth entreats
Dunson, they both sit on horseback slightly off center in the frame, Dunson to the
left and Garth to the right, the more dominant side of the screen. But it is Dunson
who ultimately asserts his control during this interaction, when he cuts off the
discussion by saying, “I’ll do the thinking around here,” abruptly turning his horse
around and riding out to the left.
This abrupt exit after a summary termination of discussion is a regular feature
of Dunson’s managerial behavior. In a momentous scene, after Buck Keneally has
caused the stampede that kills Dan Latimer, we again see that Dunson is unable to
connect with his subordinates and the way in which this ultimately defines them as
his opposition rather than his allies. After Latimer’s death, Dunson tells Garth to
provide the dead man’s wife his wages in full for the drive and to buy her “anything
she wants.” His last request is clearly in memory of Latimer’s expressed desire to
reward his wife with a pair of red shoes after the drive, yet Dunson stumbles over
his statement of good intentions and cannot quite personalize it to include Latimer’s
expressed intention. Again, this interaction takes place as Dunson and Garth sit on
either side of the frame and it ends with Dunson’s termination of the conversation
and abrupt exit from the frame. Dunson’s impatience and assertion of control by
abandoning his proximity to Garth within a two-shot suggests that the clash between the two men is about management theory. Garth represents the more enlightened manager of the rationalized workplace of the twentieth century, while
Dunson suggests the heedless nineteenth-century capitalist.
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Again, this change in management theory refers both to the general era in
which the action of this film took place and to the period of its release. Although
the broader discussion of productivity and working conditions really began in the
1890s and after the turn of the century—a few decades after the film—in the
allied areas of industrial psychology and management theory, conceptions and work
models were being developed based on the assumption that a less brutalized worker
was potentially a more productive worker. Major figures in this movement ranged
from Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford to Hugo Munsterberg and John B. Watson.
This movement was part of the broader impetus of progressivism as a managerial
strategy and a political movement.37
One can find the ideological successors to progressivism involved in the making
of post–World War II foreign policy. Indeed, individuals such as Henry Stimson
and Elihu Root served in the latter stages of that movement and helped formulate the strategies of international economic centrality during the postwar period. We can see national leaders in both periods employing the same broad means
to co-opt dissent on the left and the right through a general appeal to rationality
and mutual gains. As Gabriel Kolko explains, “With a system of grants, the administration [Truman in 1947] now came to believe it could restructure an ideal
world capitalist trading structure within a limited time span, and then allow it to
operate in a self-generating system of triangular trade able to purchase America’s
vast surplus with the earnings of its own products, either in the United States or
in the raw-materials producing Third World.”38 Enlightened internationalism
sought not rivalries and conflict but managed economic relationships and relative stability and prosperity for all.
Since Red River is about markets and modernity, Garth’s technique wins out.
This shift is very much in the spirit of reform and is not a revolution, as was the
introduction of Taylorism and other labor management techniques. When the herd
is handed over to the livestock jobber in Abilene, the check is made out to Dunson.
Garth challenged Dunson’s authority over his hands but not his ownership of his
cattle. Garth introduced the role of the manager as necessary for modern economic ventures, while not disputing the omnipresence of Dunson, who looms over
the whole enterprise. Indeed, after Dunson is deposed as the leader of the drive,
the specter of his return actually haunts those who go on.
On to Greater Glory. The visual structures of Red River, and to some degree
those of My Darling Clementine, define the need for figures such as Dunson and
Earp, even as the narratives in which they are embedded tell of their inevitable
eclipse. In such a scenario, only those who are physically capable can compete with
the power of the land. This mythic clash between humans and landscapes, with the
land giving way at the hands of those who are worthy and able, defines the drama of
the western. In Red River, Dunson must emerge from this drama—whatever his
flaws. In My Darling Clementine, even though Wyatt departs at the end, he has
brought about the more enlightened regime of Clementine Carter. Thus, these films
adapt the terms of frontier mythology to postwar international relations.
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These two “classic” westerns show the frontier as a place where the American ethos of the individual could be articulated and then recontained in a social
structure that offered a moral order based on postwar American assumptions
regarding the nature of the world and the terms of Cold War international relations. Such a world sees the eclipse of figures such as Earp and Dunson as merely
evolutionary. Despite passing from the forefront, their ethos lives on and their
presence can be summoned where necessary—such as in Korea or Vietnam.
But in the highly influential terms of these films, the genius defined by the
frontier experience and of American exceptionalism is the way in which the “West”
ultimately produces a world made safe for corporate capitalism in an international context.
In this light, it should come as little surprise that my students viewed The
Virginian as a realist novel. On some level, Owen Wister well understood that
the genre of the western easily suits ideologically loaded assertions about the
efficacy of an “American way of life.” Like these films, his novel dramatizes how
those men who exhibit the terms of fitness, which are not acquired but appear
innate, rightfully rule. The notion of natural fitness is one with significant implications for the concepts of “race” and “nation.” As I learned in this course, when
the biological definitions of fitness are enshrouded in the mythology of the frontier, they maintain nefarious powers of explanation and may require highly focused strategies of explication.
Notes
I gratefully acknowledge the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund for its support in the
writing of this essay.
1. See Richard Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 12–16.
2. For a discussion of the formulaic terms of postwar westerns, see Michael Coyne, The
Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (London: I. B.
Tauris, 1997), particularly 1–15. Also see Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural
Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) for a structural
treatment of westerns. Wright is interested primarily in the formal characteristics of the
genre but at times offers valuable, if general, cultural/historical explanations for those
features. See pages 130–40, in which he discusses the manner in which westerns reproduce and reconcile important disjunctions between the individual and the community.
See also his less convincing arguments (173–84) regarding pre– and post–World War II
distinctions in economic production. Indeed, the transitions he discusses, between an
economy of individual enterprise and the post–World War II government-managed
economy, can be dated from around the turn of the century. See Alfred Chandler, The
Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap
Press, Harvard University, 1977), for an encyclopedic treatment of this transition.
3. See Frederick Jackson Turner, in George Rogers Taylor, ed. The Turner Thesis, 3rd ed.
(Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1972), 3–28; for trenchant commentary, see Richard Slotkin,
The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (New
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89
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
York: Athenaeum, 1985), 29–36; Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 20–23; David Wrobel,
The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New
Deal (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 35–37; and Alan Trachtenberg,
The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1982), 13–17.
Lenihan, Showdown, 13.
See Bill Brown, Reading the West (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 1–41.
Ibid., 39.
Hawks initially was both the director and the producer of Red River, but the cost of the
film led to the bankrupting of his production company. The film did make money and
received approving reviews on its release. See Gerald Mast, Howard Hawks, Storyteller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 297–98, and Robert Sklar, “Empire
to the West: Red River,” in John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson, eds., American
History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1979), 167–82.
Bosley Crowther, qtd. in Robert Lyons, ed., My Darling Clementine: John Ford, Director (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 152.
Although there seems to be some dispute regarding the sheer numbers of westerns
produced in the late 1940s and 1950s as a proportion of films produced, there seems
little disagreement about the genre’s significance. This era spawned the rise of the
“adult western.” See Lenihan, Showdown, 3–9; Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America
(New York: Vintage, 1976), 283; David Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York:
Norton, 1981), 511–14; J. Fred MacDonald, Who Shot the Sheriff: The Rise and Fall of
the Television Western (New York: Praeger, 1987), 1–12; John Cawelti, The Six-Gun
Mystique (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1970), 2–3; and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York:
Athenaeum, 1992), 347–49.
See Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Historical Civilization (London: Verso, 1983), 13–14.
See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), and Historical Capitalism with Historical Civilization.
Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 29.
William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1980), ix.
For a germane discussion of Wayne as a cultural icon, see Garry Wills, John Wayne’s
America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). For a more conventional Hollywood
biography, see Ronald L. Davis, Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). For considerations of Henry Fonda of a far more
limited conception, see John Springer, The Fondas: The Films and Careers of Henry,
Jane, and Peter Fonda (New York: Citadel Press, 1970), and Peter Collier, The Fondas:
A Hollywood Dynasty (New York: Putnam, 1991). In addition, see Kevin Sweeney,
Henry Fonda: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), and Allen
Roberts, Henry Fonda (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984).
See John P. Diggins, The Proud Decades: Americans in War and in Peace, 1941–1960
(New York: Norton and Co., 1988), 110–17.
Paul Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of
the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 102.
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17. Melvin Small, Democracy and Diplomacy: The Impact of Domestic Politics on U.S.
Foreign Policy, 1789–1994 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 81.
18. Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), 3.
19. Ibid., 48.
20. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, 85.
21. Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987), 151.
22. Ibid., 152.
23. Thomas D. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 1850–1880 (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1989), 12–13.
24. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72.
25. Odie B. Faulk, Tombstone: Myth and Reality (New York: Oxford University Press,
1972), 180–85.
26. Pauline Mitchell Marks, And Die in the West: The Story of the O.K. Corral (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1990), 43–44.
27. Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 78.
28. For an illuminating discussion of populism, see Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of
America, 177–81. See also Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), and Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise:
The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
29. See Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (Boston: Little
Brown, 1890) and The Interest of America in Sea Power (Boston: Little Brown, 1897);
Josiah Strong, The New Era (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1893); Brooks Adams, The
Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Macmillan, 1896) and America’s Economic
Supremacy (New York: Macmillan, 1900); and Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of
the West (New York: Putnam, 1897).
30. McCormick, America’s Half-Century, 19.
31. Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 26.
32. Diggins, The Proud Decades, 72.
33. See also Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 359–
83, particularly 359–61.
34. Donald Worster, “Beyond the Agrarian Myth,” in Patricia Limerick, Clyde Milner, and
Charles Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History, (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1991), 21.
35. Robert Sklar, “Empire to the West,” 177.
36. Michael Coyne connects the film to the beef shortage in the U.S. during World War II
and the labor strife immediately after. Coyne, Crowded Prairie, 54–55.
37. For my treatment of this movement see Stanley Corkin, Realism and the Birth of the
Modern United States: Cinema, Literature, and Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 169–72. See also Chandler, The Visible Hand, and Martin Sklar, The
Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), for related discussion.
38. Kolko, The Limits of Power, 360.
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