WAPO review of Heather Cox Richardson's new book

[swag]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/southern-elites-western-libertarians-and-the-conservative-coalition/2020/04/17/f4352c1c-6d4d-11ea-b148-e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3GfE055QeVQoet4WqE9_x4YEv5BSQPfqLuV08ls18plsjK8ADVcyoSpRc

Excerpt:

. . .


Richardson fittingly turns to the myth of the American cowboy, which “carried all the hallmarks of the strife of the immediate postwar years: [The cowboy] was a hardworking white man who started from nothing, asked for nothing, and could rise on his own.” In fact, she underscores, about a third of cowboys were people of color, and it was a dangerous, unrewarding life. Theodore Roosevelt and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated the West as a land of opportunity and promise, but those perceptions bore little relation to the harsher realities. As in the South before, so now in the West, “poor white men had little opportunity, people of color and women had even less, and leaders worked to keep it that way,” Richardson writes.

Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan built their political careers on the Western myths of proud independence and self-made heroism. Both also had a taste for cowboy cosplay. Goldwater appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1963 in Western gear with his arm around the muzzle of a tan horse. In the 1970s and 1980s, photojournalists snapped pictures of Reagan on horseback, wearing his white cowboy hat, at his Rancho del Cielo in the Santa Ynez Mountains, known as the Western White House. Reagan defined himself against effete, urban New Deal liberalism. His political philosophy was as ill-suited to the economic realities of the late 20th century as Hollywood western film sets were to the elements. Reagan was fond of telling adoring crowds: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Today, amid the worst health crisis of the modern era and when Americans could use more government help, that tired saying seems particularly grotesque.

Moving from Reagan and the rise of the New Right, Richardson turns to more recent history. She sees in President Trump the culmination of an elite white paternalism, imbued with a sense of macho self-reliance, that the Republican Party has nurtured for decades. In the 2016 election, Trump swept all the states of the former Confederacy, with the exception of Virginia. He also had a strong showing in the West. His cynical vision of an America that only he could save, his cronyism, his casual misogyny, and his preference for elite corporations over the middle and working classes fit a long-standing pattern. It was little wonder that Trump fulfilled his promise to gut the government, ignore expertise and “put in charge of government departments officials whose only qualification was great wealth.”

Richardson ends her book with a kind of call to action. The conservative vision of oligarchs, she argues, stands in direct contrast to other American ideals of equality and self-determination. She fittingly titles her conclusion “What Then Is This American?” Does the nation truly hold to its possibilities and promises? When he started his presidency, Trump defined it as “a land of carnage, a nightmare.” But Richardson sees positive developments in the resistance and the female candidates who claimed stunning victories in the 2018 midterms. An otherwise dark picture is brightened when she notes that “women and voters of color are helping to redefine the image of an American for the twenty-first century, as they did briefly, after the Civil War and after World War II.” There is a glimmer of hope, especially in these tumultuous times, that a more just and equal America will emerge and thrive.

[dweller]

1. She sees in President Trump the culmination of an elite white paternalism, imbued with a sense of ma

macho self-reliance, that the Republican Party has nurtured for decades.

that and a pic of fatnixon in assless chaps should cinch it

✌🏼

[The Magistrate]

2. It Can Be An Odd Experience, Sir

To look at old teevee westerns, from sixty odd years ago. A surprising amount of what older men of right-wing persuasion think about right and wrong, and its political expression, can be seen on display in them. What people imbibed as popular entertainment when young seems to have influence that is not well explored, and I suspect it grows more important with age, as there is a certain nostalgia which sets in, I have found.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. Or in my case, a daily experience

MeTV runs two episodes of The Rifleman on Saturday afternoons from 5 to 6 p.m. That follows two episodes of Wanted: Dead or Alive, which follows two episodes of Rawhide, which follows an hour of Bonanza, which follows....

https://nocable.org/tv-listings/zip/20500-washington-dc?t=noon&d=2020-04-25

I don't sit through all that. I do try to catch The Rifleman, though I usually multitask my way through it. I scoffed some time ago when a friend said it was his favorite show. I shouldn't have. It's a good show.

The Rifleman is an American Western television program starring Chuck Connors as rancher Lucas McCain and Johnny Crawford as his son Mark McCain. It was set in the 1880s in the fictional town of North Fork, New Mexico Territory. The show was filmed in black and white, in half-hour episodes. The Rifleman aired on ABC from September 30, 1958, to April 8, 1963, as a production of Four Star Television. It was one of the first prime time series on US television to show a single parent raising a child.

Overview

Main article: List of The Rifleman episodes


Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Crawford, and Chuck Connors in 1962.

The series centers on Lucas McCain, a Union Civil War veteran and widower. McCain had been a lieutenant in the 11th Indiana Infantry Regiment, and he had received a battlefield commission at the Battle of Five Forks just before the end of the war. (This conflicts with Episode 3/25, "The Prisoner," in which a former Confederate cavalry major states that he was Lieutenant McCain's prisoner after the Battle of Fort Donelson.) Having previously been a homesteader, McCain buys a ranch outside the fictitious town of North Fork, New Mexico Territory, in the pilot episode. He and his son Mark had come from Enid, Oklahoma, following the death of his wife, Margaret (nee Gibbs), when his son was six years old.

The series was set during the 1880s; a wooden plaque next to the McCain home states that the home was rebuilt by Lucas McCain and his son Mark in August 1881.

A common thread in the series is that people deserve a second chance; Marshal Micah Torrance is a recovering alcoholic, and McCain gives a convict a job on his ranch in "The Marshal". Royal Dano appeared in "The Sheridan Story" as a former Confederate soldier who is given a job on the McCain ranch and encounters General Philip Sheridan, the man who cost him his arm in battle. Learning why the man wants him dead, Sheridan arranges for medical care for his wounded former foe, quoting Abraham Lincoln's last orders to "... bind up the nation's wounds".

McCain has human flaws. In "Death Trap", an episode with Philip Carey as former gunman (and old adversary) Simon Battles, he is unwilling to believe the man has changed and become a doctor. It takes a gunfight (with Battles fighting alongside him) to make him admit he is wrong. In "Two Ounces Of Tin", with Sammy Davis Jr. as Tip Corey (a former circus trick-shot artist turned gunman), McCain angrily orders him off the ranch when he finds him demonstrating his skills to Mark. Corey suggests he is a hypocrite, because McCain has an equally deadly reputation in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, where he first acquired the nickname "the Rifleman", and where his wife had died in a smallpox epidemic.

Back then, there weren't many shows with blacks and whites working together. Walker, Texas Ranger deals with racial injustice in more than one episode. That series came along many years later.

[Marcuse]

3. I do remember poor squatters being run off the Ponderosa, Big Valley, High Chapparal, Shiloh etc.